Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon said he asked the state attorney general to “start looking into” the conduct of Justice Department election observers deployed to the state for last week’s primary election.
“It sounded like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” Gordon told the state canvassing board on Wednesday, according to NBC News. “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.”
The Justice Department sent observers to Wyoming as part of a broad effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to override states’ authority to administer and monitor elections. The president has continued to allege that there has been widespread fraud in elections and has pushed to increase federal control over the voting process.
Two attorneys from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division monitored polls in Laramie County, according to a press release posted last week.
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Gordon, a Republican, noted that while he did not oppose the election observers’ presence, he believes their “behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was.”
Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said the observers asked questions that were “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws,” and asked to interview voters before Lee blocked their requests.
The Republican election official also railed against the attorneys’ deployment in the county, calling it “a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections.”
The Wyoming attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment. It remains unclear whether state authorities will further investigate the issues.
The DOJ announced it was sending election monitors to Wyoming and Florida on the same day of their primaries. Gordon said state and local election officials like Lee were not aware of their arrival.
“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,” Lee said in a statement to NBC News.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, has led the mobilization of federal election monitors to states across the country — sending 75 monitors across five states and over 200 polling locations this primary season.
“Election monitoring is an ongoing priority for this office,” Dhillon wrote in its announcement last week.
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