Poll watchers or intimidation force?
Trump urging his supporters to keep an eye on voting places
The group of Trumpcampaign officials came carrying cellphone cameras and a determination to help the president’s reelection efforts in Philadelphia. But they were asked to leave the city’s newly opened satellite election offices Tuesday after being told local election laws did not permit them to monitor voters coming to request and complete absentee ballots.
On social media, rightwing news sites and in the presidential debate Tuesday night, President Donald Trump and his campaign quickly suggested nefarious intent in the actions of local election officials, with the president claiming during the debate that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and urging his supporters everywhere to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
The dark and baseless descriptions of the voting process in Philadelphia were the latest attempt by the Trump campaign to undermine confidence in this year’s election, a message delivered with an ominous edge at the debate when he advised an extremist group, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by.”
The sinister insinuations and calls for his followers to monitor voting activity are clear. What’s less apparent is how the Trump campaign wants this to play out.
Trump and his campaign often seem to be working on two tracks, one seemingly an amped-up version of mostly familiar election procedures like poll watching, the other something of a Pandora’s box with few guard rails.
In the first, Justin Clark, a
lawyer for the Trump campaign, told a conservative group this year of plans to “leverage about 50,000 volunteers all the way through, from early vote through Election Day, to be able to watch the polls.” The head of the party in Philadelphia said Wednesday that there would be multiple poll watchers at every site in the city, which would mean at least 1,600 Republican watchers in Philadelphia alone.
Thea McDonald,
a
spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said the operation was needed because “Democrats have proven their lack of trustworthiness time and again this election cycle.” She added, “President Trump’s volunteer poll watchers will be trained to ensure all rules are applied equally, all valid ballots are counted, and all Democrat rule-breaking is called out.”
In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has distributed carefully lawyered training videos to prospec
tive poll watchers around the country describing what they can and can’t do while monitoring the voting process, imploring them to be courteous to “even our Democrat friends.” The poll watchers will challenge ballots and the eligibility of voters, but they are not supposed to interact with voters themselves.
Voting rights groups fear that effort could veer toward voter intimidation. But the question is how far Trump’s supporters will take the exhortations to protect a vote the president has relentlessly, and baselessly, described as being at risk of widespread fraud.
The Republican National Committee has been allowed to participate in poll watching only because the courts in 2018 lifted a consent decree that had barred them from doing so for 31⁄
2 decades, after the party undertook an operation to intimidate New Jersey voters in 1981.
Now, poll watchers are being instructed in specific detail. In Michigan, they are being told to record when any paper jams occur, while those in Arizona are being given a detailed breakdown of the state’s voter identification requirements.
But while official poll watchers are being schooled in legal procedures, Trump and some of his surrogates, including his longtime confidant Roger Stone and his son Donald Trump Jr., have recently floated conspiracy theories that also sound like calls to arms.
During a recent appearance on “The Alex Jones Show,” a far-right radio program that peddles conspiracy theories, Stone said that ballots in Nevada should be seized by federal marshals, claiming that “they are already corrupted” and that Trump should consider nationalizing the state police. Stone, a felon whose sentence was commuted this year by the president, has ties to the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group whose members have shown up armed with ARstyle rifles at protests.
Many have been aghast at the president’s tactics. Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, a Democrat, tweeted Tuesday that telling supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully” amounted to intimidation. “FYI — voter intimidation is illegal in Nevada,” he wrote. “Believe me when
I say it: You do it, and you will be prosecuted.”
Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, said Trump and Republicans “continue to engage in these voter suppression efforts because they know if we have a free and fair election they will lose.”
AndBenjamin Ginsberg, a retired elections lawyer for Republicans, said Trump’s debate comments went “several degrees farther than his campaign and the RNC have gone in describing their Election Day operations plans.”
While Trump and his allies give license to election discord, official party poll watchers are required to view training videos that provide a legalistic look at their role, which state election laws tightly limit.
Both parties solicit volunteer poll watchers, a process Republicans previously led at the state level amid the consent decree. In a new video tailored for Pennsylvania, prospective poll watchers are told they must wear identification and remain outside an enclosed space designated for voting. Questions must be directed to a party hotline or elections personnel, not voters.
But such legal niceties are already falling away as early voting begins. Trump and members of his family tweeted allegations against Philadelphia, and right-wing news outlets amplified the message of poll watchers being “barred” from early voting.
But city officials said they were enforcing the law and would continue to do so.
“We have law enforcement officers, we have protocols in place to make sure all the voters are safe,” said Omar Sabir, a Democratic city commissioner in Philadelphia. “Don’t let anything or anyone intimidate you from exercising your right to vote.”