"They've agreed they're not going to communicate with voters inside voting locations. They're going to respect our laws. They're going to stand outside and they're not going to bother voters," Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams told Spectrum News.
The Republican, who refused to hand over sensitive voter data to the Department of Justice earlier this year, said he doesn't predict problems with the observers.
"This is something that's a long-standing program, has been used before. We don't have any reason to believe it's going to be any sort of election interference," he added.
Others aren't feeling as confident in what to expect from monitors this time around, given previous administration statements and actions surrounding elections.
Poll workers should be ready for anything.Dr. Mollie Cohen, Purdue University political science professor
Dr. Mollie Cohen teaches political science at Purdue University, specializing in how partisan features of election administration affect voters' confidence. She told an online panel featuring experts from Kentucky and North Carolina that poll monitors have seen their authority weakened over decades, but it's more difficult to predict how the current administration might utilize them.
"Currently, poll monitors have pretty limited rights, in theory. My expectations about how cautious they're going to be in this current electoral context are weak. I don't have strong expectations... I'm not a lawyer, and we have certainly seen the testing of novel legal theories in the last several years. Poll workers should be ready for anything," she said.
Kentucky's lone Democratic lawmaker in Washington, Rep. Morgan McGarvey, has said he believes work is underway to ensure the Department of Justice doesn't engage in overreach.
The Associated Press reports that a sprawling election protection effort on the left is expected to deploy tens of thousands of monitors, who will be met by the largest-ever monitoring program by the DOJ and still more observers from Republican-aligned groups. The result could be unlike anything seen at the polls in recent memory.