When the Justice Department announced a week and half ago that it would send monitors to watch California’s elections, it didn’t say who exactly would be doing the monitoring.
For Orange County, a populous and ethnically diverse area south of Los Angeles, the administration tapped Michael Gates, a lawyer with a history of questioning the county’s voting procedures.
For years, Mr. Gates worked as the city attorney for the Orange County community of Huntington Beach, where in 2024 he helped pass the first local voter identification law in the state. When the California attorney general and secretary of state sued, saying that the city’s law conflicted with state election laws, Mr. Gates defended the city in court.
In February, Mr. Gates was appointed deputy assistant attorney general in the federal Justice Department’s civil rights division. Shortly afterward, the department sued election officials in Orange County, alleging that noncitizen immigrants were receiving mail-in ballots and voting. The Department of Justice filed the lawsuit after the county registrar refused to release unredacted voting records and registration information for alleged noncitizen voters.
Local election officials said this week that the Justice Department had informed them that Mr. Gates and an assistant U.S. attorney, Cory Webster, would be serving as election observers in Orange County. Mr. Webster was hired as a U.S. attorney late last year….
It was unclear precisely how Mr. Gates and Mr. Webster were observing the election in a county with nearly two million voters. But Democrats questioned Mr. Gates’s ability to be a fair and impartial monitor.
Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said he planned to send his own monitors to guard against any voter intimidation. And the state Democratic Party sent out more than 2,000 of its own observers — a record number of volunteers in the role — and had about 150 lawyers stationed around the state. While some Democratic officials were worried about voter intimidation, several said that they were more concerned about what the federal officials would say after the election.
“If they so much as blink at anything like voter interference, they will find themselves in parking lot or in jail,” said Justin Levitt, who served in the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration. “But I think they will continue to sow doubt without any evidence.” Mr. Levitt said that as a political appointee, he would not have taken such a role in monitoring elections….