BOSTON, Mass. — Federal election monitors from the U.S. Justice Department are expected to watch voting in Boston and Lowell on Nov. 3, Massachusetts election officials said, a repeat of what happened during the September primary.
Deb O’Malley, spokeswoman for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, said the department routinely sends monitors to both cities because of their language requirements. Boston prints three separate bilingual ballot versions, and Lowell has the only trilingual ballot in the state.
When the department announced monitors for Boston and New Bedford ahead of the Sept. 1 primaries, Gov. Maura Healey called the move an effort to intimidate voters. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said the monitoring is routine and aimed at places that had problems in recent elections. The state previously investigated the Boston elections department after several city polling places ran short of ballots in 2024.
Boston voters will not see only federal monitors. Nationally, the Justice Department is running its largest monitoring program ever, while Democratic groups and watchdog organizations, among them the American Civil Liberties Union and Common Cause, plan to post tens of thousands of volunteers outside polling places. Republican-aligned groups are sending observers too.
Trump administration and military leaders have said immigration officers and soldiers will not be sent to voting locations. On the Democratic side, the national party’s network of state committees has formed a new cybersecurity team, made up of former FBI and CIA officials, to flag online falsehoods such as AI-made deepfakes.
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