Missouri sues DOJ in effort to block poll monitors
The Republican-led state of Missouri asked a judge to block the Justice Department (DOJ) from dispatching lawyers to St. Louis to monitor adherence to federal voting rights laws on Election Day.
Missouri’s attorney general and secretary of state claimed in the lawsuit that, “at the 11th hour,” the DOJ is seeking to “displace state election authorities” by sending monitors to polling locations across the city. Federal prosecutors countered in court filings late Monday that the city itself agreed to election monitoring as part of a separate settlement.
The DOJ announced its intent to send poll monitors to 27 states in a press release Friday, asserting the agency “regularly deploys its staff to monitor for compliance with federal civil rights laws in elections in communities all across the country.”
“To secure elections, Missouri exercised that traditional authority by enacting a law that strictly limits who, besides voters, can be present in a polling location. Poll monitors employed by DOJ are not on that list,” the state’s complaint reads.
“Yet without specifically citing any federal authority authorizing its actions, DOJ announced on Friday November 1 its intent to displace Missouri law and place unauthorized poll monitors in polling locations in the City of St. Louis.”
St. Louis is the only Missouri city where Justice Department monitors plan to keep an eye out on Election Day. In 2021, St. Louis reached a settlement with the Justice Department after the federal agency identified “architectural barriers” at polling places to people with disabilities, including inaccessible parking and too-steep ramps or stairs-only entrances.
As part of that settlement, reached in the final days of former President Trump’s administration, the city’s Board of Election Commissioners agreed to let the Justice Department monitor for compliance — including on Election Day.
The Justice Department will monitor compliance with federal voting rights laws in several other states, including several jurisdictions in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Missouri, which has been won by the Republican presidential candidate in every election this century, is not a battleground state.
In an opposition brief late Monday, the Justice Department asked the court to deny Missouri’s request to block its monitors. The agency pointed to its settlement with St. Louis’s Board of Election Commissioners.
“To the extent Missouri argues that state law prohibits federal officials’ planned monitoring, that state law, as interpreted, stands as an obstacle to the enforcement of the federal law — here, the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) — and is therefore conflict-preempted,” wrote prosecutor Simon Jerome.
The Justice Department declined to comment otherwise on the matter.
Updated at 9 p.m. EST
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