What a Monitor Means
What a Monitor Means
The voter rolls in this country are dirty. I did a whole piece on that, and on the tool the states built to clean them.
This one is about something else. This one is about what it means when the federal government sends people to your county.
In November the Department of Justice plans to send about a thousand of them. In the presidential cycle of 2024 it sent 714, across 86 jurisdictions in 27 states. For the mid-terms of 2022 it was 289. Almost four times as many monitors as the last mid-terms. Have the people running your elections gotten that bad at their jobs?
So look at what those announcements actually say. The ones I have read say transparency. They say ballot security. They say compliance with federal law. They do not allege fraud.
There is no accusation in them to answer, because no accusation was made.
Here is something I will say without fear of successful contradiction.
When you walk down the jetway, the thought crosses your mind. Not panic. Nothing that would stop you from boarding. Just a thought, somewhere in the back of it: this thing could go down. Most of us have had it. Some of us have it every single time.
And when you back out of the driveway on a Tuesday morning, you do not think about somebody crossing the center line into your lane. It never surfaces. Not once.
Now look at the two numbers. Last year our roads killed thirty-six thousand six hundred and forty Americans. That is about seven hundred a week. And 2025 was the worst year in the sky since 2018 — a widebody down at Ahmedabad, a midair collision at Reagan National — and worldwide, airline crashes killed about four hundred people.
Our roads kill more Americans in one week than the whole world lost to airline crashes in the worst aviation year in seven.
The thought you have is about the thing that almost never happens. The thing that does happen never crosses your mind. And it is not that the thought is wrong. It is that it is wildly out of proportion to the risk.
Here is why proportion goes wrong on us. Take any infectious disease and follow it down. Of the whole country, some are exposed. Of the exposed, some are infected. Of the infected, some show symptoms. Of those, some get sick enough to go to a hospital. And of those, some die.
Run it with generous numbers, higher than most real diseases. Three hundred million Americans. Forty percent exposed: a hundred and twenty million. A quarter of those infected: thirty million. A quarter of those with symptoms: seven and a half million. Ten percent of those hospitalized: seven hundred and fifty thousand. Five percent of those die.
Thirty-seven thousand people. Which is about what the roads did last year.
So a disease that reaches forty percent of this country kills about what our roads kill — and the roads do it again the next year, and the year after that. Every stage of that funnel takes a bite. The number at the bottom is nothing like the number at the top.
None of that is a reason to be careless. There is always a reason to be cautious and careful and pay attention. That is the job.
But when somebody wants you afraid of a thing, ask one question. Does being afraid of it change a single thing you would do differently? If it does not, the fear is not doing any work for you. Ask who it is doing work for.
A voter registration list is the top of a funnel.
Of the names on a bloated roll, most belong to people who moved, not to people who died. Of those who moved or died, somebody would have to know which ones are still listed.
And of those, the ones who moved are still breathing. They can walk into their new polling place and vote, and now there are two ballots under one name and a referral sitting on a prosecutor's desk. So the movers are the dangerous pile to work from. What is left is the dead, and the dead are the smaller pile.
Of those, which ones have nobody paying attention. And then that somebody has to walk into a polling place here in North Carolina and hand a poll worker a photo ID with a dead man's name on it — that is the law in this state now — or request that man's mail ballot to an address he controls and get the signature past a verification clerk. And then do it again. And again. A hundred thousand times, in the right places, to move a federal race.
Here is the part that gets left out.
Every one of those votes leaves a mark. A cast ballot puts a permanent entry in the voter history under that name. After the election, that history gets matched against death records. And if the real voter walks in, it turns up at the poll book that morning, in front of everybody.
You do not secure a building by making the door impossible to open. You secure it by making sure that anybody who comes through leaves a mark on the way in.
That door is not standing open. That door is wired.
As a way to steal an election, it is about the dumbest one available.
Which brings me back to the people being sent to your county.
Eighty-six counties, out of roughly sixty-five hundred election jurisdictions in this country. A thousand people, against something like ninety-five thousand polling places. Whatever that is, it is not coverage, and it is not an audit. It cannot be, at that arithmetic.
When the paper says a man was arrested on probable cause and indicted by a grand jury, we all draw a conclusion. And most of the time we are not entirely wrong to. There is a standard behind it. There is a docket. There is a charge that says what he is accused of, and eventually there is a courtroom where somebody has to prove it.
The Department of Justice names your county and accuses it of nothing.
There is no published standard for how the county got picked. There is no docket. There is nothing to answer, and no place to answer it. And into that silence, the neighbors put a reason. Because people always do.
I don't know how those counties get selected. I looked. There are no published criteria. The request channel is an email address at the Voting Section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. You are not required to sign your name. The Division decides.
That may be entirely proper, and it may always have been. I have no evidence otherwise and I am not alleging any.
What I am saying is that the Department cannot prove it either. And a program that just went
from 289 people to a thousand ought be able to.
So that is the ask, and it is a small one. Publish the criteria. Log the requests. Report the count. Then nobody — not a party committee, not a foreign service, not me — can ever tell you that list was rigged, because the record will be sitting right there.
I'll put the sources under this one. Go read them, and catch me where I'm wrong.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!
Pre-Record Fact Check
Load-bearing figures with sources. All verified in session. Flagged hard per standing instruction.
Monitor counts
714 monitors in 2024 across 86 jurisdictions in 27 states; 289 in 2022; approximately 1,000 planned for November 2026. The 86-jurisdiction / 27-state figure is DOJ's own. The 714 and 289 counts come from a DOJ official speaking to CBS News, not from a DOJ document — say 'reported' if you want to be strict.
Road deaths — NHTSA
36,640 estimated traffic fatalities in 2025, a 6.7% decrease from the 39,254 reported for 2024. 36,640 divided by 52 is 704 per week; the script says 'about seven hundred a week.' The 2025 fatality rate of 1.10 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled was the second lowest in recorded history, so this is not a cherry-picked bad year — it is the best year the roads have had.
Airline deaths — worldwide 2025
IATA Annual Safety Report 2025: 394 onboard fatalities plus 35 other fatalities, from 8 fatal accidents — the highest annual total since 2018, against 244 onboard in 2024 and a five-year average of 198. Two events caused more than half: the 29 January midair collision near Reagan National and the 12 June Ahmedabad crash. The Aviation Safety Network's airliner figures are 420 onboard plus 33 on the ground from 12 fatal accidents; its broader all-aircraft database gives 548. The script says 'about four hundred people,' which matches IATA onboard. If challenged, the highest defensible worldwide figure is 548 — and 704 in a week still exceeds it.
The disease cascade — the arithmetic, checked
300,000,000 → 40% exposed = 120,000,000 → 25% infected = 30,000,000 → 25% symptomatic = 7,500,000 → 10% hospitalized = 750,000 → 5% die = 37,500. NOTE: an earlier dictated version had 12 million at the symptomatic stage and 50,000 dead. 25% of 30 million is 7.5 million, not 12 million, and the error cascaded. The corrected figure of 37,500 is ABOUT THE SAME as the 36,640 road deaths, not fewer — which is the stronger comparison, since it does not have to be argued. The percentages are illustrative and deliberately generous, not drawn from any specific disease; say so on camera as the script does.
Election jurisdictions: 6,461 — polling places: 95,815
Both from the 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey. Polling places is item D2a. Script says 'roughly sixty-five hundred' and 'something like ninety-five thousand.'
DOJ announcements do not allege fraud
Verified against the 2024 general-election release and the 2026 primary releases for Florida and Wyoming, Minnesota, and Michigan. The script says 'the ones I have read,' which is the honest formulation. Do not upgrade it to 'none of them.'
North Carolina photo ID
NC is a strict photo-ID state. Nationally, 36 states request or require some form of ID; the remaining 14 and D.C. verify identity by other means, most often signature comparison.
Request channel
DOJ's Civil Rights Division publishes an email address for monitoring requests and lists what it asks requesters to provide. Nothing on that list is required. The Division's general complaint form states the reporter is not required to give a name or contact information.
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