Saying he is “always worried about Donald Trump and his enablers trying to undermine people’s right to vote,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said that his administration is ready to protect Keystone State voters at the ballot box.
Speaking at an event in Philadelphia on Friday, Shapiro said that he is “prepared in court and prepared should they try and bring personnel into certain communities, particularly minority communities, to try an intimidate people, make it harder for people to vote, or make them worried about showing up to vote.”
According to a CNN report, Trump and his allies inside and outside his administration are aiming to blanket polling places with an expanding network of party and federal election monitors this November, intensifying scrutiny of the nuts and bolts of voting as Trump hunts for what he claims, without evidence, is widespread cheating and fraud in US elections.
Trump’s Justice Department says it will dispatch more than 1,000 monitors on Election Day in what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has called the “biggest DOJ election observer effort in history” — hundreds more than the Biden administration deployed in 2024. New records reviewed by CNN suggest that several DOJ monitors deployed during this year’s primaries helped challenge Trump’s 2020 election loss. Another pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a government elections website in 2016.
While most jurisdictions that hosted DOJ monitors during the primaries reported no issues with their presence, federal observers sent to Wyoming were accused of disruptive behavior by Republican officials in the state.
“We have great coordination with our Pennsylvania National Guard, with Pennsylvania State Police, the local law enforcement, and we will do everything in our power to stop Donald Trump from interfering with this election,” said Shapiro. “And ensure that vote by mail or if you vote in person, you will have access to the ballot box and it will be protected.”
Separately, the Republican National Committee is training new “special monitors” to scrutinize voting machines — recording serial numbers, inspecting security seals and photographing results tapes — and report any concerns or discrepancies to the party’s legal team through a special hotline, according to RNC training materials from Wisconsin that have not previously been reported on.
“All of this sounds typical, but these are not typical times,” said Tammy Patrick, chief program officer for the National Association of Election Officials. “In the past few years, election officials have said to me, ‘It’s like they’re showing up looking for the body.’”
Trump and Shapiro have a history dating to the 2020 election when Shapiro served as the Commonwealth’s Attorney General.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Pennsylvania for its unredacted voter rolls, which Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt refused to hand over. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in June, making Pennsylvania the 10th state to notch a win against the DOJ over this issue.
But that didn’t stop the Trump administration’s scare tactics. Pennsylvania was one of four states Trump singled out in a primetime address this summer: He claimed there were 15,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls. Schmidt questioned the methodology the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used to come up with those figures, while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the DOJ both threatened to prosecute election officials personally for any incidents of illegal voting.
DHS later admitted it lacked “high confidence” in its claims.
In April, Auditor General Timothy DeFoor conducted a voter roll audit of more than 200,000 motor-voter registrations sent by PennDOT in the first half of 2024, finding that just one noncitizen was registered (who never voted and had his registration canceled).
Also over the summer, DHS began to withhold security grants from some states, including Pennsylvania, over their refusal to bend to the administration’s election-related demands. Shapiro joined other states in suing over the agency’s alleged extortion scheme.
And in August, CNN reported that Homeland Security Investigations was launching a voter fraud investigation surge in a few targeted states, including Pennsylvania. The next month, the DOJ announced fraudulent registration charges against three individuals in Pennsylvania.
