In addition to poll workers, campaign volunteers, and thousands of eligible voters, this week’s elections in Alamance County also brought out some biennial visitors from Washington, D.C.
For the third time in six years, the U.S. Department of Justice sent election monitors to keep an eye on the county’s elections.
According to the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs, Alamance County was one of three places in North Carolina where federal observers were dispatched ahead of Tuesday’s midterms. Also on the DOJ’s itinerary were Wake and Mecklenburg counties – which, like Alamance, had been subject to federal monitoring during the last Presidential election in 2024.
The DOJ’s Public Affairs Office notes that its Civil Rights Division has conducted these electoral spot checks ever since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This year, however, marked the largest monitoring blitz in the division’s history – with some 1,000 federal observers assigned to locations in all 50 states.
In addition to the Voting Rights Act, the agency’s monitors were reportedly on the alert for potential violations of the Help America Vote Act, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Other areas of concern for federal authorities are provisions for disabled voters and instances of voter suppression or intimidation.
Among the agency’s stops in Alamance County was the polling location at Graham’s Bethany Presbyterian Church, which is situated less than a mile away from the county’s election office.
According Alamance County’s election director Dawn Hurdle, the DOJ’s monitors apparently found nothing amiss as they passed through the county on Tuesday.
“They had my contact information in the event they saw anything they needed to report,” she recalled in an interview Wednesday, “and I heard nothing from them.”
