NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Federal election monitors stood outside polling places in New Haven on Tuesday, asking whether voting materials were available in both English and Spanish, according to the New England News Collaborative.

The Trump administration sent four monitors to the city to check compliance with federal voting rights laws, the collaborative reported. They were part of a roughly 1,000-person deployment by the U.S. Department of Justice to all 50 states, the largest in the department's history.

Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas said last week that the department had told her office and the city it would send two teams of two monitors to New Haven, focused on language assistance and access for voters with disabilities.

New Haven's Democratic and Republican registrars of voters denied the monitors entry to polling places. The registrars cited state law, along with concerns about voter intimidation and efforts to undermine public confidence in elections.

Connecticut law bars federal observers from going inside polling places. The Justice Department told the city the monitors have no power to arrest or detain anyone and must stay outside the 75-foot zone around polling places set by state law, according to the report.

Before Election Day, people from Thomas' office, the city and the state attorney general's office met with Justice Department officials to go over what Connecticut law allows, she said. Thomas said the department assured them the monitors would follow state and local rules. She said keeping the monitors out of polling places is a matter of state law, not partisanship, and noted that election officials in Indiana and Kentucky have taken the same position.

"Nothing about the presence of federal monitors changes your right to vote," Thomas said.

Voters react

Laura Cahn, Democratic co-chair of Ward 26, said she saw a monitor at a polling place in the Westville neighborhood at 6:30 a.m. Cahn said the monitor's presence felt like an invasion of privacy and that she worried voters would feel watched.

"We want everyone to feel like their vote is confidential," she said.

Jeremy Anderson, a voter, also saw a monitor outside his Westville polling place. He described seeing a man yell at the monitor and said he himself would not take his anger out on a fellow citizen.

Mayor Justin Elicker said thousands of residents had already voted and that voters should feel comfortable going to the polls.

State and federal officials

Joshua Foley of the State Elections Enforcement Commission said the state's election hotline had received about 60 calls on a range of topics by midday Tuesday, none of them about Ward 26. State officials said they did not know exactly where the monitors would be stationed before Election Day.

Federal officials said the monitors, working under the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, are checking compliance with federal voting rights statutes. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement that the department was pursuing election transparency in an assertive and nondiscriminatory way.

A Justice Department spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, told States Newsroom that the monitors would only watch and report possible violations to the department, which would review them after Election Day.

A larger-than-usual deployment

For the 2022 midterms, under the Biden administration, the department sent monitors to 64 jurisdictions in 24 states, States Newsroom reported. Election experts have said even 1,000 monitors are far too few to affect voting broadly. The 2024 election had more than 95,000 polling places, according to U.S. Election Assistance Commission survey data cited by States Newsroom.

John Pavia, a professor at Quinnipiac University, said federal monitors have historically been sent to Southern districts and to states with alleged intimidation or voter-roll problems, making a deployment to Connecticut rare.

Elsewhere in New England, monitors were expected in Portland and Lewiston, Maine, where Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said her office would watch them closely, according to States Newsroom. Earlier this year, monitors visited polling places in Boston, Lowell and New Bedford during Massachusetts' primary, Connecticut Public reported.

The program has drawn scrutiny since Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, described the behavior of monitors at his state's primary as "very odd." In October, the NAACP sued the Justice Department for records about the program. That case is still pending, States Newsroom reported.