GOP steps up effort to patrol voting
Freed by 2018 court ruling, party pursues purported fraud
WASHINGTON — Six months before a presidential election in which turnout could matter more than persuasion, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are mounting an aggressive national effort to shape who gets to vote in November — and whose ballots are counted.
Its premise is that a Republican victory in November is imperiled by widespread voter fraud, a baseless charge embraced by President Donald Trump but repeatedly debunked by research. Democrats and voting rights advocates say the driving factor is politics, not fraud — especially since Trump’s narrow win in 2016 underscored the potentially crucial value of depressing turnout by Democrats, particularly minorities.
The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.
The efforts are bolstered by a 2018 federal court ruling that for the first time in nearly four decades allows the national Republican Party to mount campaigns against purported voter fraud without court approval. The court ban on Republican Party voterfraud operations was imposed in 1982, and then modified in 1986 and again in 1990, each time after courts found instances of Republicans intimidating or working to exclude minority voters in the name of preventing fraud. The party was found to have violated it yet again in 2004.
The 2018 ruling merely “allows the RNC to play by the same rules as Democrats,” a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, Mandi Merritt, said in a statement.
“Now the RNC can work more closely with state parties and campaigns to do what we do best — ensure that more people vote through our unmatched field program,” the statement said.
Democrats will deploy their own army of poll watchers, seeking both to maximize Democratic turnout and contest Republican practices they believe improperly challenge or deter voters. One allied group seeking to counter the Republican effort, Fair Fight, plans to have its own representatives in the same swing states Republicans have targeted.
The Republican program escalates a focus on limiting who can vote that became a juggernaut after the Supreme Court dismantled the Voting Rights Act in 2013. It also reflects an enduring tension in American life in which the voting rights of minorities — whether granted in 1870 by the 15th Amendment or nearly a century later by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — seldom seem free from challenge.
Besides the national party and Trump’s campaign strategists, conservative advocacy groups are joining lawsuits, recruiting poll monitors and mounting media campaigns of their own. Leading them is a new and well-funded organization, the Honest Elections
Project, formed by Leonard Leo, a prolific fundraiser, advocate of a conservative judiciary and confidant of Trump.
Republicans will have an Election Day operations program “that probably no other presidential campaign has had before,” Josh Helton, a Republican consultant, said at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee in March. “It’s going to be all hands on deck.”
In battleground states, that extends even to quiet places like Fond du Lac County, an eastern Wisconsin outpost of about 100,000 people and 1,200 farms midway between Green Bay and Milwaukee.
“I think the big push is going to be for poll observers” in November’s general election, the Republican Party county chairman, Rohn Bishop, said this month. “No harm in making sure.” Indeed, he said that training sessions for election monitors were already in the works.
Democrats who have been tracking the effort say the goal is not to limit fraud, but to make the supposed threat of election theft the tentpole of a coordinated campaign by Republicans and their allies to limit the number of Democratic ballots counted in November.
“This is a burn-it-down strategy, a strategy to win at all costs,” said Lauren GrohWargo, the senior adviser at Fair Fight, the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia. “They see this as central to victory.”
Fair Fight claims that the groups’ combined spending on lawsuits, election monitoring and spreading allegations of cheating will far exceed the $20 million announced to date. That message, blasted out, in particular by Trump, has stirred concerns that the Republican fraud drumbeat could lay the groundwork for Trump and his supporters to reject the election results should he lose.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the Republican National Committee responded to requests for interviews, although the committee provided a summary of its work and policies. In essence, Republicans say Democratic efforts to relax voting restrictions are partisan moves that demand a firm response, and that Republican countermeasures reflect standard political mobilizing.
Others say the Republican focus on vanishingly rare cases of fraud targets a politically useful phantom.
“It’s utter nonsense. This has been shown over and over,” said Kenneth Mayer, an elections expert at the University of WisconsinMadison. “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”
Being present at the polls isn’t unusual; in fact, both parties monitor polls. Monitors check whether poll workers follow the rules and can complain to election supervisors or summon party lawyers if differences are not resolved.
They also can challenge voters’ right to cast a ballot — if, for instance, a voter lacks a required ID card. That can force voters to cast provisional ballots that are not counted unless they prove their eligibility.
But Democrats say the Republican focus on monitors and repeated allegations of fraud are part of a coordinated strategy to depress turnout, especially by minorities, by fueling anxieties among voters already suspicious of the authorities.
“They don’t need to keep millions of people away” from the polls, Groh-Wargo said. “Challenge a couple of voters here, a couple there, and it all aggregates up. They realize they’re going to win or lose this thing at the margins.”