RALEIGH, N.C. — The U.S. Department of Justice is sending election monitors to three North Carolina counties on Tuesday as part of a massive expansion of the longstanding practice across the country.

Alamance, Wake and Mecklenburg — three of the largest counties in the state — will all receive DOJ monitors on Election Day, the State Board of Elections confirmed.

“Our monitors only observe. They do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process,” a DOJ official told county election officials in an email shared with The News & Observer.

NC Newsline first reported on the deployment of the monitors in North Carolina.

A spokesperson for the State Board of Elections said the agency has not been informed of how many monitors are being sent or to which exact polling locations they will be assigned.

While federal election monitors have been a longstanding practice, this is the “largest-ever election monitoring effort” by the DOJ, according to the Associated Press. The Trump administration plans to send roughly 1,000 monitors to all 50 states.

The observers are intended to monitor compliance with a variety of federal voting laws, including the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

Longstanding practice, talk of potential shift

Brooks Fuller, policy director for the voting rights group Common Cause, said he does not have concerns about career DOJ staff carrying out election monitoring duties.

“This has been a part of our elections for many years,” Fuller told The N&O. “When career personnel from the Department of Justice are enlisted to make sure that counties around the country are safeguarding the right to vote, they are doing the job that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has asked them to do.”

He did, however, say that voting rights advocates are concerned about a recent court filing, in which the DOJ indicated that staff from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives could serve as election monitors.

“We have not we have not seen evidence of this, however,” Fuller said. “All we know is that people close to the president have held that out as a possibility. But right now in North Carolina, we’re seeing no red flags that anybody other than career DOJ officials are doing the job they’ve always meant to do.”

The DOJ has said that FBI and ICE agents will not serve as monitors.

In an email to the affected counties in North Carolina, Tim Hoegemeyer, general counsel for the State Board of Elections, reminded staff that DOJ monitors are not permitted inside the voting enclosure while voting is going on.

“They would be just like any other member of the public,” he said.

Monitors can watch the setup process before voting begins and can approach voters outside the polling place.

Fuller reminded voters that they are not required to talk to anybody who approaches them outside a polling site if they don’t want to.

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