Wyoming’s Republican governor raises concerns over ‘aggressive’ DOJ election monitors

Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon expressed concern Wednesday over how election observers from the U.S. Justice Department observed the state’s primaries last week, saying it was “aggressive” and “irregular.” “It sounded like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” he said at a state canvassing board meeting Wednesday. “It just was irregular and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into, you know, kind of the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff,” Gordon added. He said that state and local officials had not been told ahead of time of the DOJ’s plans. He added that while he was not “objecting to the observers,” their “behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was.” “I’m not saying anything went wrong or anything else, and I certainly think the conduct of this election was phenomenal,” Gordon said. Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee, a Republican, also criticized the conduct of the DOJ monitors as “a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections.” “Shortly after learning of their presence, I spoke with a DOJ official in Washington who informed me that the decision to deploy monitors to Wyoming was made on short notice, and an email had been sent to me, but it may have gone to the wrong address,” she said in a statement to NBC News. Lee said the monitors’ questions were “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws.” She added that they “requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired, and wanted to examine our tabulators.” Lee said she denied requests by the monitors to interview voters. Asked for comment Thursday by NBC News, the DOJ referred to a statement released on Aug. 18, the day of Wyoming’s primary, by the state’s U.S. attorney. “Voters deserve absolute confidence that their ballots are secure and their voices are heard without interference,” Darin Smith, the U.S. attorney for Wyoming, said in the statement. “We are working alongside local officials to ensure every lawful vote is protected.” In a separate Aug. 18 statement, the DOJ said that it would be sending two attorneys with its civil rights division to Laramie County, the state’s most populous, for election monitoring. The department has deployed more than 80 election monitors across seven states during this year’s primaries, including for this week’s runoffs in South Carolina, according to a Tuesday news release. Dispatching federal election monitors to polling places around the country is not an unusual practice — the DOJ’s Tuesday release noted it sent monitors to nine states during the 2022 midterms. But the Trump administration’s plans to deploy upward of 1,000 monitors for the midterms has alarmed Democrats and voting rights advocates amid continued unfounded claims of election fraud from the president and his allies. The criticism from Gordon and Lee is particularly notable, as Republican officials have largely aligned with Trump’s “election integrity” agenda.