Rep. Joe Morelle (D–N.Y.) said 275 Democratic House staffers have signed up to serve as official election observers for the Nov. 3 midterms, a record for the party.
Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, disclosed the figure during a press call on Oct. 19 hosted by Try And Stop Us, an activist group.
“We’ve never had so much interest by our staff who want to be trained to be official election observers,” Morelle said.
He said the volunteers will be trained and sent across the country in their official capacities to watch vote counts and recounts and to keep contemporaneous notes. Those firsthand accounts would form a record if a House race is challenged or contested, he said, because the committee recommends to the full House which candidate should be seated.
Morelle said Democrats will come to an agreement with their Republican counterparts on the committee before deploying anyone.
The two sides will pick roughly 40 to 60 races that polling shows are likely to be the closest. Republicans will send observers to the same races, he said, and observers from both parties are barred from interfering.
The House has run the program for decades through the committee, which is chaired by Rep. Bryan Steil (R–Wis.).
The committee sent more than 75 observers to 67 congressional districts on Election Day in 2024, typically deployed in bipartisan pairs. Any House staffer except interns can volunteer, according to the committee’s program page for Republicans.
Steil said in a July 15 statement launching this year’s program that the observers “are our eyes and ears on the ground ensuring the integrity of Congressional elections.” The committee trained more than 200 House staff as observers in 2024.
A representative for Steil and the GOP House Administration Committee did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times before publication.
The Senate is running a parallel effort. Senate Democrats said on Oct. 14 that they had recruited more than 100 staff observers to send to nine states with contested Senate races.
A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R–S.D.) said Senate Republicans are training their own to match Democratic efforts.
Morelle said House Democrats began work nearly a year ago and identified about 150 “potential threats” to the election. He said the list is now down to about 70 because some perceived threats have been taken off the board.
As examples, he cited Trump’s effort to restrict mail-in voting through the Postal Service, a rule the Supreme Court left on hold for the midterms when it declined on Sept. 14 to lift a nationwide injunction against it, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, which has not become law.
The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia over voter rolls, and a Brennan Center tracker says 26 of those suits have been dismissed. The Brennan Center for Justice describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization at the New York University School of Law.
The White House has defended its own election efforts. Responding to the Senate Democrats’ program, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in an Oct. 14 statement to The Epoch Times that “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”
She said the administration is prosecuting election crimes and strengthening election infrastructure security. A White House official also pointed to Justice Department plans to deploy 1,000 election monitors to polling places on Election Day.
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