By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
November 3, 2026
Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, will be sending teams of monitors to polling locations in Lake County, Indiana, on Election Day, to assist Hoosier voters and try to resolve problems that could potentially interfere with voting.
The monitors are being dispatched in direct response to plans by the U.S. Department of Justice to send about 24 federal election monitors to Lake and Marion counties on Election Day. In total, the Justice Department is expected to deploy 1,000 election monitors to polling sites across the country on Nov. 3.
Advancement Project monitors may be at the same polling places in Lake County as the federal election monitors, according to Hani Mirza, director and senior attorney of the Power & Democracy Program at the Advancement Project. The monitors will provide whatever help the voters need, he said, adding that the organization is expecting voters will have problems relating to citizenship status, not being able to use student IDs as identification and interference from law enforcement.
“We’re serving as a resource for voters, flagging systemic voting issues … and educating voters on voter protection issues,” Mirza said.
Indiana is among six states as well as Washington, D.C., to which Advancement Project is sending its election monitors. The national nonprofit is joining the larger effort by Count US IN, an Indiana-based election protection organization, which runs an election defender program that will be sending poll monitors to locations across the Hoosier State.
The teams from Advancement Project, which will include attorneys, organizers and trained poll monitors, plan to arrive before the polls open at 6 a.m. and stay until the last voter in line has cast a ballot after the polls close at 6 p.m.
Nationwide, Advancement Project monitoring teams will be watching for issues that can keep eligible voters from casting a ballot, including confusion over registration and IDs, long lines, misinformation, and intimidation, according to the nonprofit. Also, the team members will support voters whose eligibility is challenged.
Advancement Project monitors will continue their work after the polls close. The team members will remain engaged during the ballot counting and certification process, and the nonprofit is prepared to join its partners in responding to “any attempt to discount valid ballots or interfere with certification,” according to a press release.
“Every eligible voter has the right to cast a ballot freely, without fear or interference,” Carmen Daugherty, executive director of Advancement Project, said in the press release. “(On Election Day), our team will stand with partners who have spent years building trust in their communities, ready to answer questions and step in the moment something goes wrong. Voters should know they are not alone.”
The NAACP and Advancement Project are trying to prevent the Justice Department from sending federal law enforcement agents as election monitors.
In a lawsuit filed in October in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the NAACP and Advancement Project asserted the DOJ intends to enlist criminal prosecutors and other law enforcement personnel to serve as election monitors. Pointing to a series of public statements by Justice Department officials, the two nonprofits claimed rather than “merely monitoring” whether states were complying with federal voting rights laws, the central focus of the federal government’s new election monitoring plan is to instead promote “election integrity” and investigate “debunked allegations of voter fraud.”
Rather than protecting the voting rights guaranteed by federal law, the NAACP and Advancement Project contended in their lawsuit that the Department of Justice has “twisted the Poll Monitoring Program into a tool” that is being used to pursue “baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud.”
“(The Justice Department’s) focus on purported voter fraud, combined with the first-time use of criminal prosecutors and the unprecedented scale of deployment, is intimidating to voters, who reasonably fear facing wrongful surveillance, investigation, or prosecution for exercising their right to vote,” the NAACP and Advancement Project argued in their lawsuit.
The federal court denied the plaintiffs’ motion for the temporary restraining order to prevent the DOJ from using law enforcement agents to monitor the Nov. 3 general election. However, the case is continuing and the parties have been ordered to keep working to process and produce the records that have been requested.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
