Wyoming’s Primaries Were a Preview of Trump’s Midterm Interference

Wyoming poll workers were subject to "irregular" questioning during elections August 18.Scott Olson/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Wyoming’s governor is speaking out about what he calls “aggressive” and “irregular” behavior on the part of Department of Justice employees sent to monitor the state’s August 18 primary elections. The two election monitors were sent as part of a “monitoring initiative aimed at promoting transparency,” according to a DOJ press release. But their behavior managed to upset even Republican Gov. Mark Gordon. “I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns. I don’t like that. I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either,” Gordon told the Wyoming state canvassing board Wednesday. Local and state officials, Gordon said, were not made aware that the election monitors would be present, and fellow Republican Debra Lee, the chief election officer for Wyoming’s most populous county, said the federal employees “did not offer their credentials until I requested they do so.” Then, Lee said, they proceeded to ask questions that appeared “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws …about the nature, length, and timing of poll worker training. Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired, and wanted to examine our tabulators.” The news outlet WyoFile reported that the state’s attorney general is now investigating what happened that day. Trump administration officials have stated that they intend to send up to 1,000 election monitors to the polls this fall, in what some Democratic lawmakers are calling “a mechanism for intimidating voters and pressuring local election officials”—pressure that evidently unsettles even voters and civil servants in conservative states. In many of last week’s Wyoming primaries, Republican candidates who amplified the president’s claims of widespread election fraud lost. But some Republican governors and candidates in other states have expressed excitement at the prospect of federal officials at their polling places—like Maine Republican gubernatorial nominee Bobby Charles, who told members of a Young Republican club earlier this week that he intends to call his “friend” Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation czar, to ask for ICE presence at the polls.