The US Department of Justice (DOJ) will send federal election monitors to Manchester and Nashua for New Hampshire’s Sept. 8 primary, part of a six-state deployment that Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department’s civil rights division, announced this week.
The department confirmed the full city-level list—including Manchester and Nashua—to the Daily Caller.
The announcement came just eight days after US District Judge Joseph LaPlante dismissed a DOJ lawsuit seeking to compel the state of New Hampshire to turn over its voter rolls—data that includes dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers.
Secretary of State David Scanlan (R) had refused the request last year, pointing to a state law that bars releasing the full list to anyone but parties and candidates. LaPlante found the department never explained why it needed the records—a gap he called “independently fatal” to its claim.
New Hampshire became the 10th state where judges have rejected the demand.
New Hampshire is the outlier on the list. Of the six states, it is the only one without a Democratic governor and chief election official, per Democracy Docket. And Dhillon did not name Manchester or Nashua in the department’s initial Tuesday announcement; the two cities surfaced a day later, when she read a jurisdiction list aloud in a conservative talk-radio interview, The New Republic reported.
The monitors target a state among the nation’s highest turnout and a strong record of voter integrity.
New Hampshire posted roughly 74% turnout in 2024—about ten points above the national rate and among the top five states—in elections run town by town by local officials. At a recent trial over a separate voting law, experts testified that from 1998 to 2024, at most eight people identified as noncitizens may have cast ballots statewide—26 ballots at most over 26 years, per InDepthNH.
New Hampshire Republicans have already enacted one of the country’s strictest proof-of-citizenship voting laws—HB 1569, which Gov. Chris Sununu (R) signed in September 2024, the state-level counterpart to the federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. A federal judge blocked its harshest provisions for the coming elections while the state appeals; voters must still prove identity, age, and domicile and show photo identification to register, and can once again attest to citizenship by sworn affidavit.
The monitors are one piece of a much wider pressure campaign. The same day it announced the deployment, the department sent letters to election officials in all 50 states and Washington, DC, warning they could face criminal prosecution for knowingly keeping noncitizens on the rolls.
Democracy watchdogs warn the move to put federal boots on the ground in US states points to a dark future for US elections.
The nonpartisan group Protect Democracy warns the administration’s election campaign is laying the groundwork for “election subversion in 2026,” describing it as a rerun of the playbook Trump has run after past losses—manufacture claims of fraud, then use them to challenge the outcome.
Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, called the FBI’s seizure of Fulton County, Georgia’s 2020 ballots earlier this year “a test run” for similar moves ahead of November.
In January, FBI agents seized more than 650 boxes of ballots, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls from Fulton County’s elections hub—what the county says was the only copy of its 2020 election records—in a criminal probe of an election settled more than five years ago. An NPR review found the FBI’s affidavit leaned on fraud claims state investigators had already examined and rejected, omitting their conclusion that the errors did not affect the county’s accurate count.
Trump has never accepted his 2020 defeat. His effort to overturn it culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Even as it installs federal officials at state-level polling places, the Trump administration has dismantled the machinery that historically protected elections—canceling election-crimes training for prosecutors, deleting its 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, and gutting the Public Integrity Section that policed Election Day.
Cinde Warmington, the Democratic candidate for governor, blasted the deployment—and tied it to Gov. Kelly Ayotte.
“How New Hampshire conducts its elections is up to Granite State election officials, not Donald Trump or his Department of Justice,” Warmington said. “Trump’s election monitors have no business interfering with our gold standard election system.”
“It’s time New Hampshire had a governor who has the backbone to stand up to Trump and this gross federal overreach—Kelly Ayotte has proven that she won’t.”
