DOJ Election Monitors Cross the Line
At least two DOJ election monitors allegedly tried to interview voters and access voting machines in Cheyenne during last week’s primary election in violation of Wyoming law, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon said.
“I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns — I don’t like that,” the governor said at a meeting with state elections officials. “And I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either.”
The DOJ monitors’ requests were denied by local election officials. The Trump DOJ has not denied the allegations that the monitors tried to interview voters and access voting machines.
While DOJ election monitors have had an important role historically in protecting the right to vote, especially for Black Americans, the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon has threatened to expand the use of monitors to make sure only eligible people vote — in what would be a serious federal incursion into state-run elections.
The governor’s account of what happened last week in Wyoming suggests monitors potentially violated the rules in multiple ways, based on a summary of guidelines for election monitoring Campaign Legal Center:
No Notice: The DOJ put out a statement the day of the primary that it was dispatching monitors to Wyoming, and claims it gave notice to the Wyoming U.S. attorney — but state and local election officials do not appear to have been notified directly.
Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said that she had no advance notice that DOJ monitors would be present. “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 told NBC News (emphasis added).
Accessing machines: Monitors are tasked with observing and reporting on compliance with federal law. They are not there to enforce federal law. Lee said the requests went well beyond the scope of federal civil rights and voting law: “They included questions about the nature, length and timing of poll worker training,” Lee said. “Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired and wanted to examine our tabulators.”
Examining tabulators on Election Day is particularly egregious and well outside the bounds of election monitoring.
Interviewing voters: Generally, federal monitors may interview voters leaving a polling place but only after they have voted. They may not intimidate voters or seek to determine their identity or eligibility to vote. The exact circumstances of the request to interview voters was not clear from the accounts provided by the governor or Laramie County clerk.
However, monitors must also abide by state laws that govern election monitoring. “But as ‘monitors,’ as per Wyoming state law, they weren’t allowed to go interview voters; they weren’t allowed to check the tabulators,” the governor told Cowboy State Daily.
No credentials: Election monitors are supposed to identify themselves as such when at a polling place, but Lee said two monitors didn’t show their credentials at first.
The governor has asked the state attorney general to investigate the episode. “Sounds like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” Gordon said. “It was just irregular, and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into the nature of all this.”
It’s not clear if this was a Keystone Cops affair, a dry run for highly aggressive and invasive election “monitoring” in key states during the general election — or, in classic Trumpian fashion, both.
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Thank you for expanding on the Wyoming voting kerfuffle, the GOPer governor's protests to the feds, and the actions described taken by those two "monitors". Every voting jurisdiction across the US needs to have a full accounting of what happened there, and use it as a valuable heads-up on what sort of shithousery to expect from the trump regime come Election Day.
The feckers are coming for us, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed, full stop.