Judge Sarah Pitlyk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, said she was “not persuaded” by Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s eleventh-hour motion, noting that the DOJ only planned to make sure polling places in St. Louis were compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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Ashcroft, a Republican, brought the lawsuit Monday morning after the DOJ announced last week that it would be deploying its staff to watch over polling places in 86 jurisdictions across more than two dozen states. The department said it would be checking that the polling sites were complying with an array of federal election laws.

Some of the jurisdictions had received weeks or months of notice about the DOJ’s planned presence, while others, such as Missouri, appear to have been caught off guard by the announcement.

Missouri attorneys had argued in their motion that the DOJ was overstepping its authority and that Missouri state law “strictly limits” who is authorized to stand watch over polling places as voters line up and cast ballots. DOJ staff members were “not on that list” of authorized poll watchers, the attorneys wrote.

The DOJ responded by pointing to a settlement agreement it reached with the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners in 2021 that authorized the poll monitoring as a result of the department identifying dozens of alleged ADA violations at polling places.

Pitlyk, the judge, wrote in her order that she could see little harm in allowing the DOJ access to St. Louis polls.

“The Court is not persuaded that the public’s interest in enforcement of Missouri’s election laws, in the absence of any non-speculative threat to election integrity, outweighs the public’s interest in the enforcement of the American with Disabilities Act in response to documented harms,” Pitlyk wrote.

Missouri’s lawsuit came the same day Texas brought a similar lawsuit against the DOJ on Monday night in response to the department revealing that federal staff members would observe polls in eight counties in the Lone Star State, including the populous Harris, Dallas, and Bexar counties, on Election Day.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, withdrew the suit on Tuesday after reaching an agreement that DOJ officials would not stand inside the polling centers and instead stay outside of them.

Poll watching in most states is typically governed by state law and involves the state granting access to a set number of designated Republican and Democratic poll watchers to observe voters at polling places on Election Day and watch over the ballot-counting process.