Gov. Mark Gordon said Wednesday that he has asked the Wyoming Attorney General to look into what he called aggressive and irregular conduct by two Department of Justice attorneys who were sent to Laramie County during Wyoming’s primary elections.
The complaint surfaced as the state canvassing board met in Cheyenne to certify the results, putting the federal presence in the middle of a routine step in Wyoming’s election calendar. Gordon said the observers were there last week and that local and state officials were not told in advance.
That matters because the Justice Department said on Aug. 18 that its monitoring initiative was meant to promote transparency and an open flow of communication between poll observers and election monitors. But Gordon said, to his knowledge, the U.S. Attorney did not know about the visit and the conduct appeared to go beyond what Congress allowed. He also said he was not objecting to the observers themselves.
“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,” Gordon said at the meeting. He added that the behavior seemed to exceed the authority Congress had given the observers, even as he stressed, “I’m not saying anything went wrong or anything else, and I certainly think the conduct of this election was phenomenal.”
The friction is not about whether Wyoming’s primary was handled properly. Gordon said it was. It is about how federal eyes arrived in a county that is central to the state’s election system, and whether those observers crossed a line while watching it. Debra Lee also voiced concern about the DOJ’s presence in Laramie County polling places, underscoring that the unease was felt locally, not just in the governor’s office.
The review Gordon requested could lead to a formal response from the Wyoming Attorney General, though no action has been announced. The broader backdrop is that federal election monitoring is not new in Wyoming or elsewhere, and the Trump administration has said it is ramping up election-monitoring efforts ahead of November, with plans to dispatch about 1,000 staff members across the country. That effort follows the Justice Department’s push to obtain voter data in 2025, which it did in Wyoming with help from Secretary of State Chuck Gray.
For now, the unanswered question is narrower than the political fight around it: what, exactly, did the observers do in Laramie County that prompted Gordon to call their visit aggressive and irregular, and whether the state’s legal review will draw any line the federal government is not supposed to cross.
