“We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, okay?” Steve Bannon bloviated recently on his podcast, promising that Republicans were going to swarm polling locations to monitor voting and try to have voters—and their votes—ejected. He’s essentially speaking for the GOP and a more appropriate representative for the GOP nationally is hard to find. In fact, the Republican National Committee and its allies among the extremist domestic terrorist groups are promising the most robust “election protection” ever.
Whether they’ll actually achieve that with valid poll workers and watchers in place on Nov. 8 isn’t clear, The Washington Post reports, because actual follow-through from Republicans getting registered with elections officials has been spotty. The RNC says it has “staged thousands of training sessions,” and party officials in Pennsylvania say they’ve got six times the poll watchers than they had in 2020. The actual showing up part, though, is in question. “In battleground states like Arizona and Wisconsin, many Republicans who have said they would serve as poll workers have not taken any shifts.”
What we do know at this point is that Republicans are already sowing the idea that the election will be corrupted, just in case Democrats do well. We also know that Trump-allied extremist groups are already intimidating voters and elections officials. In Arizona, armed vigilantes have already shown up to “monitor” ballot drop boxes, forcing law enforcement to respond.
With voters swarming the polls this fall, we need volunteers to ensure they are not unfairly turned away or threatened or intimidated by MAGA vigilantes and can have their voices heard. There’s a role for everyone—whether it’s helping voters from home, assisting voters safely in person, or tracking online disinformation. Please sign up today to be a nonpartisan election protector.
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“Every day I’m dedicating a considerable amount of resources just to give people confidence that they can cast a vote safely, and that is absurd,” Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said during a news conference. He’s referred two of the incidents to county prosecutors for potential criminal charges. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the elections office is installing bulletproof glass, and a security door requiring people entering to be buzzed in.
The Commissioners Court in Potter County, Texas, has authorized funding for enhanced security at polling places, including in the county seat of Amarillo, because of the threat of violence at the polls. “There’s a lot of things that they’re watching, they’re trying to get people to vote and help them to vote, but they also have to make sure that there’s no electioneering and that people are really following all of the rules and just being respectful of one another,” said Melynn Huntley, Potter County elections administrator. “So with some of the tone across the nation, we decided it would be a good choice here to see if we could get some funds for security.”
“We have offered a training to all of our workers about safety in the polling place and active shooter training,” said Shannon Lackey, elections administrator for neighboring Randall County, Texas. “We have been in contact with our sheriff’s office about making frequent drive-bys in the parking lot and that sort of thing and they will just be helping keep an extra, extra eye out for anything that’s unusual and be available if we need them.”
Elections offices around the country have taken measures to increase security of their physical location as well as extending protections to officials. While the external threat of vigilante poll watchers is justified, it’s not entirely clear whether Republican boasting about an army of people stationed in the polls themselves as poll workers—the people who check voters in, hand out ballots, help voters turn their ballots in, open absentee ballots—might be overstated. “In battleground states like Arizona and Wisconsin, many Republicans who have said they would serve as poll workers have not taken any shifts,” the Post reports.
The Republican boasting about poll workers in battleground states is definitely questionable. “As of mid-October, Republicans accounted for 1 percent of the poll workers in Madison, 2 percent of the poll workers in Milwaukee and 8 percent of the poll workers in Green Bay, according to data provided by city clerks,” the Post reports.
In Maricopa County, Arizona, “county officials routinely contacted Republicans who said they wanted to work at the polls only to find that many of them would not take shifts.” In Colorado, two Republican election workers were fired by the El Paso County chair because they wouldn’t say that the 2020 election was stolen. But because she couldn’t find others who were willing to work the election, the county clerk rehired them.
Michael Siegrist, the clerk of Canton Township outside of Detroit, Michigan, told the Post that Republican poll workers—inspectors, as they’re called there—just aren’t signing up. “Our percentage of Republicans participating as inspectors dropped in 2022,” Siegrist said. “Inspectors are a dying breed.”
Nonetheless, the newly recruited workers, primed to be on the lookout for fraud, present the threat of being “agents of disruption.”
“The problems don’t need to be in a thousand polling places,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “If there’s a violent incident in one polling place, that’s enough, because the election deniers have been pouring gasoline all over the country, and it just takes one match.”
Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, has taken precautions to deal with just that. “We know there’s certainly more activity this year than we saw in 2020 to place people either as observers, challengers or poll workers who have been trained through misinformation and potentially having been told to disrupt the process,” Benson said. “So we’re preparing for that.” She’s arranged, for example, for police in Macomb county to be essentially on call with a moment’s notice to respond to issues at polling places.
While MAGA election deniers might not be willing to sit in a polling place for 12 hours dealing with paperwork, they might be happy to show up and harass voters and election workers. They’ll also show up to yell about fraud and this election being stolen, which is another worry for Democrats.
“I think what you’re setting up for is Republicans to say our people were excluded [as poll watchers], ballots were counted that shouldn’t have been counted, challenges were not acknowledged that should have been acknowledged,” Democratic election attorney Marc Elias said. Sowing distrust of the election is almost as much an objective for the GOP as winning the election.
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