JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The U.S. Department of Justice is sending about 1,000 election monitors across all 50 states for the upcoming midterm elections.
The federal deployment marks a substantial increase from 2022, when the agency sent about 60 monitors to jurisdictions across 24 states.
The full list of federal monitor locations will not be made public until Election Day. In Duval County, state observers are scheduled to visit Jacksonville polling locations and watch the vote count on Tuesday.
Duval County Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland said federal officials have not reached out to arrange local visits. “So we’re opened to all those. We have not gotten any of those invitations. They must first let us know; it’s not show up,” Holland said.
Local election preparations begin well before voters head to the polls. Voting machines in Duval County undergo public testing and are sealed prior to Election Day. Reflecting on past equipment, an elections technician noted that residual material can still linger in older machines. “When we open them up to test the light again, we’ll still have chads fall out,” Holland said.
Once voting begins, ballots are processed immediately upon being inserted into machines. The votes are recorded to a thumb drive and printed at the polling site at the end of the night. Official results are transmitted over a secure network before being transferred offline to the public website via thumb drive. Holland emphasized the efficiency of local tabulation. “In Florida, we were able to tabulate those and report them in the first 30 minutes,” Holland said.
On Election Day, local operations run through a centralized command center that tracks every check-in station in the county on a monitoring screen, where a green indicator confirms active connectivity. Polling locations open at 7 a.m. sharp, backed up by auxiliary power systems. The elections technician explained that staff members maintain backup power units to handle outages. “We also have backup generators will run out there and connect the generators to the equipment,” the technician said.
Timely opening remains a strict priority for election staff. The elections technician recalled breaking locks to guarantee access when municipal facility staff could not arrive early enough. “Now they were real upset, the city’s building maintenance, because why did you break it? We could have been there by nine o’clock and I said, too late,” Holland said.
Post-election security measures include a mandatory public verification process. After the vote count, a judge randomly selects one race for a public hand count. Holland said the hand-count audit has yielded 100% accuracy in every election.
The Justice Department will release its complete deployment list of federal election monitors on Election Day.
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