LOS ANGELES (KABC) — As California waits for federal voting monitors to arrive for next week’s Prop. 50 election, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta have rolled out a plan to deal with them: send in their own monitors to watch over the feds.
Newsom has lashed out against the Trump administration’s deployment of the monitors, calling it an effort to intimidate voters and possibly declare the election illegal.
“It’s a preview of things to come, part of the rigging, part of the voter suppression,” Newsom said Tuesday. “It’s exactly why the National Guard were federalized through Election Day.”
The U.S. Department of Justice said their monitors will be going to six counties across the country, five of which are in California, including Los Angeles and Orange counties.
The DOJ’s move is “to intimidate, to create a false pretext, to go to federal court to somehow say this election was stolen, that it was conducted illegally,” according to Newsom.
“This is all happening in plain sight,” said the governor.
The Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division
Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, telling Newsom to calm down, and that “the Justice Department under Democrat administrations has sent in federal election observers for decades, and not once did we hear that this was voter intimidation.”
But Bonta said that’s the case when election sites have a history of voting rights violations, which California does not.
Bonta said state observers will be tasked with making sure the federal observers don’t break any election laws.
“They’re not going to be allowed to interfere in ways that the law prohibits,” he said. “They will, of course, be allowed to do what the U.S. DOJ election observers can always do; they can watch, they can observe like everyone else.”
Meantime, the city of Los Angeles says most of its residents vote by mail.
Mayor Karen Bass released a statement that the federal move is more about intimidation.
“For those few Angelenos who do vote in person, they need not fear anything, and they should not have to be in fear of their government,” she wrote. “Washington D.C. -we got this!”
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