Justice Department sends election monitors into Wyoming primary; county clerk says they sought access to tabulators
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division deployed two attorneys as election monitors to Laramie County, Wyoming, for the state's primary, and the county clerk said the monitors requested poll-worker training guides and asked to examine the county's tabulators.
What happened
The Department announced on the day of the primary that the Civil Rights Division was monitoring polling sites in Florida and Wyoming, with two Civil Rights Division attorneys in Laramie County, and said it had deployed over 75 monitors across five states and over 200 polling locations that primary season. Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said she had no advance notice that monitors would be present, and that they requested training guides, asked how the county acquired its new election equipment and wanted to examine its tabulators. Local election officials denied the requests. Gov. Mark Gordon said that under Wyoming law the monitors were not allowed to interview voters or check the tabulators, and has asked the state attorney general to investigate. Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said the monitors arrived soon after polls opened and said they intended to interview voters while assessing compliance with federal civil rights and voting rights laws; her office did not allow interviews in polling places. "Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired and wanted to examine our tabulators," Lee said, calling it "a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections". She said she had not been notified the monitors would be in the county; a Justice Department official in Washington told her the decision to send them was made on short notice and an email was sent to her but "may have gone to the wrong address", according to Lee. Governor Mark Gordon called the monitors' behaviour "a bit aggressive" and "irregular", and his spokesperson Amy Edmonds confirmed an investigation by Attorney General Keith Kautz, who was appointed by the governor: Wyoming's attorney general works mainly in the service of the executive branch and is not politically independent as in other states. Edmonds said no one, including Gordon, is asserting the monitoring influenced the election outcome. The department did not answer questions about the monitors and referred to a primary-day statement by Darin Smith, the U.S. attorney for Wyoming, who said monitors would be in the state "to ensure transparency, ballot security, and strict compliance with federal voting rights statutes".
Why it matters
Federal election monitoring is a long-standing civil-rights function, and what is in dispute here is its boundary: monitors observe compliance with federal law, and the requests the county clerk describes reach into how the county trains its staff and runs its count. This record notes it because the objection came from the Republican governor of the monitored state, who asked his own attorney general to examine it — which makes it a dispute about the line between federal oversight and state election administration rather than an objection to monitoring as such.