https://www.reuters.com/legal/missouri-sues-block-justice-department-sending-poll-monitors-2024-11-04/WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (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, opens new tab Bailey's request for a temporary restraining order, saying that "the harms that the state of Missouri anticipates are speculative."
