Election experts say President Donald Trump’s federal government could take unprecedented role in midterms

CHICAGO (WLS) — As the midterm election approaches, there are fears eligible voters may hit significant roadblocks at the ballot box.

For decades, the Department of Justice has dispatched election monitors across the country on Election Day.

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“This has been in order to ensure that people are able to vote, that there is no denial of voting rights,” said Jason Mazzone, a University of Illinois College of Law professor.

Mazzone told the I-Team plans by the Trump administration to do so during the midterm election this year may have serious consequences.

“I think the suggestion is that the monitors are there to make sure that people who are not supposed to be voting are not voting,” Mazzone said. “You can imagine some really drastic scenarios in which, for example, federal officers think that there’s some funny business going on, and they decide to seize ballots or make arrests. That would be tremendously disruptive of the midterm elections.”

For years President Donald Trump has called the integrity of American elections into question without evidence of wide-spread voter fraud.

ABC7 chief legal analyst Gil Soffer was once an election monitor while he was an assistant U.S. attorney with the DOJ.

“They could try to see if there’s a problem from any federal law perspective. What they certainly can’t do is interfere with the administration of the election. The question is: What does that mean? Can they go up to people, interrogate them? Can they stand in the way of people? Almost certainly not. But there’s some gray there,” said Soffer.

This month, the Department of Justice sent letters to at least 30 states, including Illinois, instructing them to preserve materials related to the 2024 election and have requested voter rolls from multiple states. The Department of Homeland Security is now involved in investigating alleged voter fraud. A DHS whistleblower told Senate Democrats investigators are accessing sensitive private data for a wild goose chase.

“There’s no evidence to support that we are having large numbers of migrants, undocumented migrants, voting in our nation’s elections. If the evidence isn’t there, why are we spending our limited law enforcement resources looking for it?” said former DHS Undersecretary for Intelligence and ABC News contributor John Cohen.

Election experts told the I-Team the president may be stoking fears to suppress the vote during the midterms, citing federal election monitors interviewing primary voters in Wyoming.

DHS says it will investigate election fraud wherever it can be found.