While the practice of recruiting poll watchers is legal, election integrity experts say the Republican Party's efforts to place partisan poll watchers in Democratic-heavy suburbs could potentially be seen as "voter intimidation."
NBC News reported Saturday that GOP-aligned groups are aiming to place poll watchers in precincts across multiple battleground states where Democratic turnout is expected to be high. And aside from potentially interfering with voters, these poll watchers could also disrupt election workers' efforts to conduct efficient oversight of the casting and counting of ballots.
Republicans claim that more poll watchers in Democratic-heavy areas are necessary to counter the specter of fraud, even though former President Donald Trump's own efforts to uncover supposed election fraud have been fruitless. Multiple companies the Trump campaign hired to look into its claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election have all said there was no evidence of any voter fraud in their respective investigations.
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"In addition to voter intimidation risks, I think that the strategy also poses the potential to be just disruptive to the election process in general," Campaign Legal Center (CLC) director of voting advocacy Jonathan Diaz told NBC.
“In the abstract, it’s a good thing to have representatives from every political party and from the campaigns, observing election processes. That’s normal,” he continued. “The problem comes when you have an effort like this that seems to be aiming to recruit people for the express purpose of uncovering the fraud that doesn’t exist.”
After losing the 2020 election, the Trump campaign pursued relief in the courts, alleging that the election was unjustly stolen due to fraudulent voting in various swing states. However, as the CLC noted, more than 60 challenges were thrown out by judges — including ones Trump himself appointed as president — either on the merits or due to lack of standing. The only case Trump won concerned a small number absentee ballots in Pennsylvania that had no impact on the final tally in the Keystone State, which Biden still won by more than 80,000 votes. And out of all of the GOP-led investigations of supposed voter fraud in Republican-controlled states since 2020, the Washington Post reported earlier this year that there were only 47 convictions out of tens of millions of ballots cast.
Diaz warned that Republican poll watchers' activities had the potential to "contribute to longer lines" and put a "bigger strain on election offices and poll workers who are already under-resourced in most parts of the country."
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"Even if voters themselves are not intimidated, even if [watchers] don’t deter people from voting, if you have these out-of county or out-of-precinct poll watchers coming in to second guess and question every single thing that election officials are doing, that can be hugely disruptive to the administration of elections," he said.
NBC reports that the GOPs "Protect the Vote" project aims to recruit 100,000 volunteer poll watchers and attorneys, and to concentrate them in suburban areas with large numbers of Democratic voters like Oakland County, Michigan (just north of Detroit), Bucks County, Pennsylvania (which is adjacent to Philadelphia), Nassau County, New York (which includes contested House seats), and the suburbs in and around Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia.
Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley insisted that the party's poll watchers would abide by the law and "respect the process."
"We work very hard on the front end to make sure that there is no voter intimidation," he said. "We’re going to respect the people that work the polls, and we’re going to respect the voters."
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Click here to read NBC's report in full.