Republicans are recruiting poll watchers to intimidate voters at the polls

Update to The entire Republican Party apparatus is gearing up to suppress the vote in 2020 (excerpt):

In 1982, the Republican Party agreed to a consent decree after Democrats sued it for activities at polling places that they said were aimed at suppressing the minority vote. The consent decree barred the organization from using voter challengers, poll watchers, i.e., the “National Ballot Security Task Force,” and vote caging plans to target and intimidate voters of color. It specifically precluded the RNC’s poll watchers from overstepping their role as election observers and prohibited them from asking voters for identification, filming or recording voters, and distributing literature about voter fraud penalties.

Every few years or so the RNC moved the court to set aside the consent decree, telling the court essentially “Honest judge, we’ll be good! We don’t do that anymore.” And every few years, the court would look at the evidence and call “bullshit!,” and extend the decree. That is, until 2018, when the RNC finally found a friendly judge to lift the consent decree. The Republican Party Emerges From Decades of Court Supervision.

“Free at last! Free at last! Free to suppress voters again, free at last!”

Actually, Republicans never really stopped suppressing the vote, they just outsourced it to third-party organizations not subject to the consent decree, like True The Vote, to do their dirty work for them. Now the RNC is ready to get its hands dirty again.

In June, NBC News reported, GOP recruits army of poll watchers to fight voter fraud no one can prove exists:

Republicans are recruiting an estimated 50,000 volunteers to act as “poll watchers” in November, part of a multimillion-dollar effort to police who votes and how.

That effort, coordinated by the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, includes a $20 million fund for legal battles as well as the GOP’s first national poll-patrol operation in nearly 40 years.

While poll watching is an ordinary part of elections — both parties do it — voting rights advocates worry that such a moneyed, large-scale offensive by the Republicans will intimidate and target minority voters who tend to vote Democratic and chill turnout in a pivotal contest already upended by the coronavirus pandemic.

Some states allow poll monitors to challenge a voter’s eligibility, requiring that person’s ballot undergo additional vetting to be counted. [Arizona does NOT allow poll watchers to directly challenge a voter]. In Michigan, for example, a challenged voter will be removed from line and questioned about their citizenship, age, residency and date of voter registration if, according to election rules, a vote challenger has “good reason” to believe they are not eligible. They are required to take an oath attesting that their answers are true and are given a special ballot.

The Trump campaign says the aim is to prevent voter fraud before it happens, despite researchers, academics and the president’s own voter fraud commission all failing to find evidence that widespread fraud exists in years of searching.

The poll-watch operation is part of a “voter suppression war machine,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams. Abrams lost her 2018 bid for governor in Georgia in a tight race clouded by allegations of voter suppression that drew national attention to issues of ballot access.

[A] coordinated poll-watch effort, advocates warned, is particularly dangerous because of the GOP’s history of using monitors to intimidate minority voters.

“We know that the targets of these actions, as we’ve seen in the past at our polls, are voters of color,” said Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of Transformative Justice Coalition, in testimony to Congress in early June, in reference to the poll watchers.

While many states are working to expand mail voting to respond to the public health threat of the novel coronavirus, poll watchers can also monitor — and sometimes challenge — absentee ballots, too.

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“What we haven’t seen in a long time — in decades — is large-scale efforts to try to question and challenge voters’ eligibility at the polls,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “The reports and the announcements that the RNC has been making suggest that that is part of the program that they’re trying to mount.”

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[V]oting rights advocates say conservative activists and Republicans have a worrisome history, such as the allegation that the RNC sent armed, off-duty police officers to patrol polls in minority neighborhoods. Additionally, the party posted signs warning that ”it is a crime to falsify a ballot or to violate election laws,” according to contemporaneous news reports.

Note: Now we have Attorney General William “Coverup” Barr’s “secret police” comprised of DOJ and DHS agencies personnel busting the heads of Black Lives Matter protestors in the streets. Who is to say that Barr will not unleash his secret police on polling locations in Democratic cities in November? If this happens, it is a “break glass” emergency moment for democracy.

In 2004, Ohio Republicans citing fraud sent 3,500 poll watchers into polling locations with plans to challenge voters they deemed ineligible; a court ruling noted that the poll challengers in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, were heavily concentrated in minority-majority polling places.

True the Vote, a group that grew out of the tea party movement in Texas and has ties to the conservative movement, was accused of intimidating voters with its poll-watching operation in 2010.

Groh-Wargo, whose group is partnering with Democratic state parties, said she had no doubt that GOP poll-watching efforts would have an effect.

“We fully expect that they’re targeting all precincts that have students, Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, refugee communities,” she said, noting her group was seeking to counter the effort with voter hotlines and poll watchers of their own.

“It’s completely unprecedented,” she said, decrying it as a “burn it down, win at all costs, institutions be damned, they’re gonna do whatever it takes” strategy.

Marc Elias, a top elections lawyer who frequently litigates on behalf of Democrats, said he expects the GOP’s 2020 poll watchers will challenge individual ballots and voters — arguing that a signature doesn’t match on an absentee ballot or using public records to allege a voter’s registration is inaccurate or out of date.

“They’re not going to sit idly by and ensure the lines move swiftly. They’re recruiting these folks so they go to polls and either intimidate voters, or at a minimum slow the process,” he said.

“What we saw in Wisconsin during COVID shows how much worse it can get,” Elias said, referring to hours-long lines that resulted from a reduced number of polling locations during the state’s April presidential primary. … Long lines will be made longer by cleaning protocols.

CNN reported on Saturday, Trump campaign’s poll-watching plans spark fears of voter suppression:

The Trump campaign is working to dispatch tens of thousands of election monitors to battleground states in what is shaping up as the Republican Party’s largest-ever poll-watching operation.

The party’s aggressive plans for poll-monitoring have sparked charges from Democrats and voting-rights groups that Republicans are gearing up to suppress voting in key states as President Donald Trump repeatedly claims, without evidence, that voter fraud will imperil November’s election.

Republicans say their new push will allow them to protect election integrity and better coordinate their get-out-vote operations. Both sides are headed for a legal showdown on the issue in Pennsylvania — a state Trump won in 2016 by about 44,000 votes out of 6 million cast.

The Trump campaign is fighting a Pennsylvania law that restricts poll watchers to monitoring voting in the county in which they live — one of dozens of lawsuits filed by Republicans and Democrats that challenge the ground rules of a fast-approaching election that state and local officials are racing to carry out in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

“By and large, having these mobilized security forces out at the polls is just a powder keg,” Wendy Weiser, of the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, said of the Republican poll observers. “There is just a very high risk in a hotly contested and emotionally heated environment of people crossing the line.”

In a statement to CNN, Trump campaign general counsel Matthew Morgan, said, “Republicans will be ready to make sure the polls are being run correctly, securely, and transparently as we work to deliver the free and fair election Americans deserve.”

The massive build-up to monitor voting marks the first time since the 1980 election that the Republican presidential nominee and the Republican National Committee will work together to monitor polling activity. In 2018, a federal judge allowed a consent decree to expire that for decades had sharply restricted the RNC’s “ballot security” activities without prior judicial approval.

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Before the consent decree lifted, “we were really operating with one hand tied behind our back,” Justin Clark, a top Trump campaign official, told an audience earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“In 2020, we have a brand-new opportunity to activate an Election Day operations program that’s really robust,” said Clark, who was elevated last month to serve as Trump’s deputy campaign manager.

During the CPAC session, Clark said the campaign was working to recruit 50,000 volunteer poll watchers. “We are going to have scale this year,” he said. “We’re going to be out there, protecting our vote and our voters.”

* * *

Both parties are gearing up for real-time clashes on Election Day and beyond.

Last month, Democratic presumptive nominee Joe Biden told supporters that his team planned to deploy 600 lawyers and 10,000 volunteers to combat what he called election “chicanery.”

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has doubled its legal budget to $20 million this year, as part of a sweeping effort to challenge voting laws and policies they view as damaging to Trump’s reelection prospects.

Outside groups also will monitor polling places on Election Day.

Fair Fight, a voting-rights group started by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has teamed up with 18 state Democratic parties to help fund and train poll watchers and establish hotlines for voters to report problems, spokesman Seth Bringman said.

Officials with True the Vote, a Tea Party offshoot that has faced questions about its past efforts to police voting, say they now are recruiting military veterans to serve as poll watchers through a program called “Continue to Serve.“

GOP officials describe a wide array of activities they will undertake as part of their newly invigorated Election Day operations — ranging from challenging voters whose eligibility is suspect to helping turn out the vote through a practice known as “poll flushing.”

Under that process, volunteers monitor which potential supporters haven’t yet voted at their polling place and alert campaign volunteers to mount a last-minute push to get those voters to cast their ballots before polls close.

In tight races, those frenetic, 11th-hour, get-out-the-vote efforts could determine which candidate wins.

In Wisconsin, where Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016 to capture the state’s 10 electoral votes, the state Republican Party has a long-established poll-monitoring operation, state party chairman Andrew Hitt told CNN.

“This year,” he said, “we have the benefit of extra resources and extra manpower coming from the RNC and the (Trump) campaign.”

In Pennsylvania, another key battleground on the road to the White House, Republicans want to overturn the residency requirements for poll monitors, as part of a broad lawsuit that challenges the state’s voting procedures.

GOP officials say the residency rule hampers their ability to bring in volunteers from other parts of the state to monitor voting in Democratic strongholds, such as Philadelphia. As part of the lawsuit, Republicans also want poll watchers to have access to locations where absentee ballots are returned.

The President himself has singled out Philadelphia for allegations of voter fraud.

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No matter the ultimate size of the GOP’s official poll-watching force, Hasen, the University of California election expert, said he’s worried about where the President’s rhetoric might lead.

“I’m concerned about rogue Trump supporters who might take matters into their own hands and go to polling places with Trump’s claims of fraud and voting problems,” he said.

The Advancement Project has a good explainer on What to Do if You Experience Intimidation at the Polls.

The ACLU has a useful poster for Know Your Rights About Voter Intimidation.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Non-Partisan Election Protection 2020 Coalition Stands Ready to Protect Voters’ Rights with hotline numbers you can call:

The Election Protection program is the nation’s largest and longest running non-partisan voter protection effort. Through the 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) hotline, our network of thousands of legal volunteers and with over 200 partner organizations, we are bringing an army of resources to beat back the barriers that voters face. Election Protection stands ready to use litigation, advocacy and reform to help ensure that every eligible American has the opportunity to exercise the fundamental right to vote in the 2020 election cycle.”

The 866-OUR-VOTE is part of a suite of hotlines that includes the bilingual hotlines administered by the NALEO Educational Fund in Spanish and English (888-VE-Y-VOTA/888-839-8682), by the Arab American Institute in Arabic and English (844-YALLA-US/844-925-5287) and by Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC and APIAVote in Bengali/Bangla, Cantonese, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, Urdu and Vietnamese (888-API-VOTE/888-274-8683) will be available for all hours the polls are open on primary days and during regular business hours on non-primary days.

Put this number and your county election office number in your cell phone before you go to vote, just in case the need arises.