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 Justice Department often monitors polling sites during elections. But the visits to Wyoming came amid President Trump’s ongoing fixation with finding evidence of fraud and vote tampering. Mr. Trump and his allies made fantastical claims that voting machines had switched votes for him to his opponent Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, and he has tried and failed to find evidence of widespread fraud or vote tampering ever since.
Mr. Trump has often returned to such conspiracy theories in his second term, arguing that widespread fraud could affect this year’s elections. As president, he has deployed the resources of the federal government, notably the Justice Department’s, to investigate his unsubstantiated claims, sowing more doubt in the nation’s elections and raising alarm among state officials about whether he will try to intervene if Republicans lose their congressional majorities in November.
Governor Gordon, a low-key, term-limited Republican who leads one of the country’s most conservative states, said at a meeting with state election officials on Wednesday that he had been concerned by the behavior of the election observers.
“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.”
The monitors ultimately visited six polling places, showing their credentials only when asked for them, Mr. Gordon said in the interview, describing their behavior as “very odd.” He said he had asked the state attorney general, Keith Kautz, to investigate the matter.
The observers had cited statutes related to the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Gordon said.
This year, the Justice Department’s observers have visited polling places in other states, including politically tense regions such as the Minneapolis area. The agency said on Tuesday that it had sent 80 monitors to seven states during primary season.
But the requests to interview voters and gain access to machines in Wyoming were unusual. And they come at a moment when the Justice Department has been locked in an intense legal battle with roughly 30 states, demanding their private, unredacted voter rolls in a hunt for evidence of noncitizen voting.
In early July, the Justice Department sent letters to every state and Washington, warning that top election officials would be criminally prosecuted if they allowed ballots to be cast by noncitizens.
The monitors in Wyoming said they had been sent to assess whether the election was in compliance with federal civil rights and voting rights laws, Ms. Lee said. But their questions appeared to be “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws,” she said in a statement.
“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.”
Their conduct, Ms. Lee said, displayed a “complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections.”
Mr. Trump has filled the Justice Department and other federal agencies with officials sympathetic to his baseless claims about the 2020 election. In Georgia, the focus of many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election, the F.B.I. this summer assigned a team to examine 2020 records seized from Fulton County, home of Atlanta.
The office of the U.S. attorney in Wyoming, Darin D. Smith, did not immediately respond to questions about the election monitors’ appearance. But in a statement provided by the Justice Department’s Washington office, Mr. Smith said that voters deserved “absolute confidence that their ballots are secure and their voices are heard without interference.”
“We are working alongside local officials to ensure every lawful vote is protected,” Mr. Smith said in the statement.
At the meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Gordon told Chuck Gray, the Wyoming secretary of state, that he did not believe the U.S. attorney’s office in Wyoming was aware that the Justice Department observers would be visiting.
But Mr. Gray, who once claimed the 2020 presidential election was “illegitimate,” told the governor that he understood that Mr. Smith had been given advance notice about the observers.
Mr. Gray said that “Wyoming election law does provide for observation.”
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Kiersten Pels, said Mr. Smith had been given advance notice.
Ms. Lee, the county clerk, said in her statement that a Justice Department official had told her the decision to deploy monitors to Wyoming was made on short notice. The Justice Department issued a statement on the day of the state’s primary saying that it was deploying observers to Wyoming and Florida to ensure “transparency, ballot security and compliance with federal law.”
Although many of the Justice Department’s monitoring efforts have been uneventful, a letter it sent in June to election officials in Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, became a flashpoint.
The letter described polling sites with machines that were not working and at least one site with a shortage of provisional ballots. It drew a scathing response from Janice Winfrey, the Detroit city clerk.
“It is important to address election performance based on facts rather than falsehoods that lead to baseless conclusions,” Ms. Winfrey said in a letter sent to Justice Department officials in July. She added that the department’s assertions form “a baseless conclusion that then becomes the pretext for additional monitoring of Detroit elections.”
Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.
