The Republican governor of one of the nation’s most conservative states, Wyoming’s Mark Gordon, is sounding the alarm on “aggressive” tactics used by federal election monitors during his state’s primary elections last week. The warning comes as President Donald Trump seeks ways to influence the upcoming midterms.
Trump has claimed he has accomplished so much that “we shouldn’t even have an election.” He has openly fretted over the possibility of impeachment if Democrats retake the House. And as his polling numbers continue to crater, the president has spent the better part of the past year backing efforts to rig congressional maps in favor of Republicans, while promoting bigoted lies about noncitizen voters and elections in minority communities.
One such gambit, it would appear, is the Justice Department’s deployment of election monitors. Typically, such monitors are tasked with upholding federal voting rights, but the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has been waging war on civil rights ever since he retook office, so this administration certainly hasn’t earned anyone’s trust on the matter of election integrity.
And now Wyoming’s GOP governor is speaking out. According to The New York Times:
Two election monitors from the Justice Department tried to interview voters and examine voting machines at polling places during Wyoming’s primaries last week, local officials said, drawing pushback from the state’s Republican governor.
The federal election monitors arrived at a polling site in Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital and its largest city, without advance notice around 7 a.m. last Tuesday, said the Laramie County clerk, Debra Lee. They asked to interview voters and inspect the machines, but were denied, officials said.
“It was aggressive, unexpected, disruptive — certainly didn’t seem to show respect for the state,” Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming said in an interview on Thursday. “We’re going to get to the bottom of it as best we can.”
The report says monitors visited six polling places and only showed their credentials when asked. Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said monitors acted with “complete disregard” for Wyoming’s laws and electoral processes as they asked about poll workers and sought to examine vote tabulators — something election deniers in the MAGA movement have obsessed over.
“They included questions about the nature, length and timing of poll worker training,” Ms. Lee said. “Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired and wanted to examine our tabulators.”
This scenario underscores the bipartisan concerns expressed in some states about Trump-aligned officials — such as Maricopa County recorder Justin Heap in Arizona — taking part in local electoral administration.
Wyoming’s governor told the Times that the election monitors’ behavior was “very odd.” And he said he made his concern clear in a meeting with election officials afterward:
“I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns — I don’t like that,” Mr. Gordon said at the meeting. “And I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either.”
Gordon also told the Times that he has directed the state’s attorney general to launch an investigation.
When Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced that the DOJ would deploy 1,000 election monitors across the country for the midterms, it sounded eerily similar to a plan she promoted in her failed bid to become chair of the Republican National Committee in 2022, in which she proposed hiring an army of election lawyers to challenge states’ electoral processes. And now there’s reason to question whether she’s using the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to carry this out.
This clear and present danger is why Democratic officials have been so outspoken in seeking to combat the Trump administration’s election meddling. In recent interviews with MS NOW, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown have laid out steps they’ve taken, and will continue to take, as the midterms approach.
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