Trump administration to send election monitors to Idaho’s largest county

The Trump administration is sending election monitors to Idaho’s largest county on Election Day next week, the state’s top election official confirmed Wednesday.

The decision comes as the Justice Department plans to deploy 1,000 election monitors — who the DOJ says are meant to assess local compliance with federal voting rights laws — to all 50 states. That would make for a significantly expanded presence than under the Biden administration, which sent election monitors to 24 states for the 2022 midterm elections, States Newsroom reported. 

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, an elected Republican, said the U.S. Justice Department notified him and the Ada County Clerk’s Office, which runs the election locally, that there will be two teams in Ada County on Election Day. Ada County Clerk Trent Tripple, also a Republican, said around six election monitors who are local to Idaho will be stationed near polling places — but not inside.

In a statement, the Justice Department said its election monitors in Idaho and elsewhere will be “doing the routine election monitoring the department has done for decades.”

“All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process. Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate,” a spokesperson for the federal agency told the Idaho Capital Sun.

Idaho’s top election official called deployment ‘routine’

The federal election monitors in Idaho, McGrane said, will be ensuring that voters have access to voting and assisting the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, such as by ensuring polling places are abiding by disability access requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. McGrane called it a routine measure. He said he last remembered election monitors sent to Idaho under the Obama administration.

“I’m fairly sure we’ve had it under all (presidential) administrations in some form. I can most clearly remember ADA conversations when Obama was president. But it has been routine in the past,” McGrane said in an interview.

The Trump administration’s decision to expand election monitors in states for the midterm elections, when control of Congress is at stake, follows recent attempts by the administration to intervene in state election processes, such as to restrict mail-in voting and obtain state voter rolls. That history has left some officials across the country concerned about the expanded election monitoring efforts. But McGrane said he isn’t worried.

“I’ve seen the concerns among my peers and others nationally,” he said. “Initially, I wanted to understand and make sure what their mission was. After talking to … the new U.S. Attorney John Shirts … I feel reassured that this is something fairly routine. This is something that we’ve experienced before. And I don’t expect that voters will really even notice that it’s happening.”

Tripple said he isn’t worried either.

“They’ve done this before. It’s happened during multiple different administrations over the last couple of decades,” he said. “ Obviously, with the temperature around elections and a little bit of friction between states and the (Justice Department), I’m sure some will probably try to make hay out of this in terms of you know political wins on one side or the other. But it doesn’t bother us at all. … This will be a good opportunity for them to kind of see how elections should be run.”

McGrane said the election monitor teams in Idaho will be in plain clothes, and staffed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Idaho, which is a part of the Justice Department that oversees federal law enforcement in Idaho. The agency directed questions about the deployment to the Justice Department. 

Ada County, Idaho’s most populated county that is home to Boise, has the highest share of Democratic registered voters in the state. The county has more than a third, or 54,000, of the state’s 123,000 registered Democrats, according to VoteIdaho, a website run by the Idaho Secretary of State’s Office. Idaho is a Republican controlled state, with nearly 650,000 Republican voters and 251,000 unaffiliated voters. 

In the Nov. 3 election in Idaho, all Republican incumbents in statewide offices and congressional seats are facing challengers. 

Idaho sent out more absentee ballots than in last midterm election, state data show

In the 2026 election, Idaho election officials have sent out more absentee ballots than during the last midterm election, in 2022, state data show. Midterm elections are when the president is not on the ballot, and midterms often have lower turnout than presidential elections.

Idaho election officials have issued 156,794 absentee ballots for the 2026 general election, according to data on VoteIdaho. That’s more than the state sent out in the 2022 general election, when nearly 138,500 absentee ballots were issued. This year’s absentee turnout is still lower than the last presidential election, in 2024, when more than 188,000 absentee ballots were issued.

The recent uptick in Idaho follows a national trend of a surge of early and absentee voting, States Newsroom reported. 

McGrane, Idaho’s top election official, said some election officials believe the turnout might be driven by a ballot initiative that seeks to end Idaho’s strict abortion ban. But he cautioned that it isn’t clear yet whether the higher absentee ballot numbers will translate into higher than usual turnout for a midterm election. 

So far, more than 98,000 absentee ballots in Idaho have been returned. To count, absentee ballots are due to election offices by the time polls close on Election Day. More than 94,000 ballots have also been cast in Idaho through early voting.