At a state canvassing board meeting on August 26, 2026, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, said he had asked his attorney general to examine the conduct of Justice Department election monitors sent to observe his state's primary. The Justice Department sent two Civil Rights Division attorneys to Laramie County, which contains Cheyenne. Gordon said some officials, including the state attorney general, were not told in advance.
“It sounded like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” Gordon said. “It just was irregular and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff.” Laramie County Chief Election Clerk Debra Lee said the observers arrived unannounced, offered no credentials, and asked detailed questions she described as outside the scope of federal voting rights laws.
What Gordon is not saying is as important as what he is. He said he does not object to the idea of election monitors, and he did not allege that anything went wrong with the vote. “I'm not saying anything went wrong or anything else, and I certainly think that the conduct of this election was phenomenal,” he said. His objection is jurisdictional: the observers' behavior “seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was.” He added, “I don't like the federal government coming in and taking our votes.”
The Justice Department pointed to an August 18 statement from Wyoming U.S. Attorney Darin Smith: “Voters deserve 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.”
The scale is what makes a single county's complaint worth recording. DOJ said it has sent more than 80 monitors to seven states for primaries so far this year, and has said it plans to send about 1,000 monitors to polling sites in November. The administration has maintained the deployments follow decades-old federal monitoring practice. Voting rights groups had argued the monitors could be used to undermine the process or to seed doubt about results. The first sustained public complaint about how they actually behaved has now come from a Republican governor (see The Supreme Court Lifts One of Two Injunctions on Trump's Mail Voting Order, Ruling 6-3 That the States Sued Too Soon Rather Than That the Order Is Lawful and The USPS Mail-Ballot Rule Is Blocked for November, and the Post Office Issued It as a Final Rule Anyway).