WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department has been cleared to send lawyers to polling sites in Missouri and Texas on Election Day to monitor compliance with federal voting rights laws after those Republican-led states had sued to block it from doing so.
Both states are among the 27 that the department said it would send staff out to monitor polling locations on Tuesday to ensure compliance with federal voting rights laws, as it has done regularly during national elections.
Republican former President Donald Trump faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s presidential election. Trump continues to make false claims of widespread voting fraud in his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden and has urged his supporters to turn out at polling places to watch for alleged fraud.
Judges in overnight decisions declined requests by Missouri and Texas for court orders to block the Justice Department monitors. Shortly before the judge’s decision in the Texas case, the state’s attorney general reached an agreement with the department regarding the conduct of its election monitors.
While some of the U.S. locations that the Justice Department will monitor include key counties in the seven battleground states expected to help decide the election’s outcome, it is sending personnel to other locations such as counties in Texas, Massachusetts, Alaska, South Dakota and New Jersey.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, in a lawsuit filed on Monday accused the department of making an 11th-hour plan to “displace state election authorities” by sending poll monitors to locations throughout St. Louis.
But U.S. District Judge Sarah Pitlyk, a Trump appointee in St. Louis, denied Bailey’s request for a temporary restraining order, saying that “the harms that the state of Missouri anticipates are speculative.”
The department said two election monitors were in Missouri to monitor one polling place in St. Louis that had reached a settlement in 2021 at the end of Trump’s presidency over concerns about architectural barriers and other problems that could have hindered voting by people with disabilities.
As part of that settlement, the city’s Board of Election Commissioners agreed to allow the Justice Department to monitor for compliance, including the monitoring of polling places.
In Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday accused Biden’s administration of engaging in a “lawless intimidation campaign” by sending federal agents to state polling and counting locations without authority to do so.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee in Amarillo, in an order docketed just after midnight on Tuesday said he “cannot issue a temporary restraining order without further clarification on the distinction between ‘monitoring’ and ‘observing’ on the eve of a consequential election.”
Kacsmaryk ordered the department to confirm “no observers” would be present in polling locations in Texas, but the judge did not issue an restraining order. The judge’s action was docketed just minutes after Paxton’s office dropped its request for such an order, having reached its agreement with the Justice Department.
Under the agreement, the department’s election monitors will remain outside of polling and central count locations and be subject to Texas law regarding electioneering within 100 feet (30 meters) of those locations.
Paxton in a statement called the agreement a victory that ensures that Justice Department personnel cannot enter Texas election locations.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch, Brendan O’Boyle, Nate Raymond and Shubham Kalia; Editing by Scott Malone, Will Dunham, Bill Berkrot, Lincoln Feast and Ed Osmond)
Comments