{"id":316805,"date":"2026-10-29T10:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T10:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/316805\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T10:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T10:10:08","slug":"pa-election-2026-poll-watchers-monitors-and-voting-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/316805\/","title":{"rendered":"PA election 2026: Poll watchers, monitors and voting rights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Can ICE agents be stationed at polling places?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.cornell.edu\/uscode\/text\/18\/592\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Federal law<\/a> has been clear since the Civil War: The government cannot deploy any person in the service of the United States to a polling place unless it is \u201cnecessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>Federal officials have denied they have any plans to send immigration enforcement agents to polling places. \u201cICE isn\u2019t there to patrol the polling places. We\u2019re there to enforce specific threats,\u201d Markwayne Mullin, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2026\/09\/01\/mullin-says-dhs-could-deploy-to-polling-sites-for-specific-threats-arrests-01060040\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">told reporters in September<\/a>. \u201cThe only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we\u2019re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>Mullin recently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2026\/09\/01\/mullin-says-dhs-could-deploy-to-polling-sites-for-specific-threats-arrests-01060040\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">threatened to imprison<\/a> election officials who did not comply with DHS directives.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile I appreciate people\u2019s concern, I haven\u2019t heard anything that\u2019d make me nervous,\u201d said Bluestein, a Republican.\n  <\/p>\n<p>Bucks County Sheriff Danny Ceisler, a Democrat, agreed. \u201cI think ICE is the one that gets all the attention, but I\u2019m concerned about the president messing with the mail,\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s things on the back end with the counting that I\u2019m more concerned about than polling place intimidation,\u201d Ceisler added. \u201cWe are prepared for whatever.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>With no reports of concrete plans for federal police deployments, Ceisler said, it\u2019s safe to relax a bit.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Trump administration \u2014 he can\u2019t have a Diet Coke without it getting leaked. For there to be a deployment of federal resources, this needs to get planned. \u2026 Operations orders, they would get leaked,\u201d Ceisler said.\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Can ICE agents be stationed at polling places? Federal law has been clear since the Civil War: The&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[25694,28,30,29,1824],"class_list":["post-316805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-elections-2026","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}