Sand in the gears
Since the days of Jim Crow, conservatives determined to keep the “wrong” people from voting have done most of their election suppression outside the polling place. They were Democrats before the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement; they are Republicans today. Beatings, threats, intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests and more in the old Confederacy. Since Republicans took over the election suppression business, their methods have been more subtle, mostly, and mostly outside the polling place. Post 2020, they mean to change things up a bit.
Heidi Przbyla reported this week in Politico that rather than deploy volunteers outside to disrupt operations and challenge voter eligibility, the GOP is recruiting and training poll workers, the taxpayer-paid election judges and administrators who operate inside the polls for local boards of election:
The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.
“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.
Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”
Seifried also said the RNC will hold “workshops” and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May 2022 training session, he said he’d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.
The people who administer elections are recommended by the major parties but are supposed to act in good faith in the public interest to administer elections fairly and dispassionately. Those who do not get the boot. (That happened to one Republican judge here during the North Carolina primary; the decision by the county board of elections was bipartisan.) The GOP appears to have plans to game that system as well. Politico has video.
This is Republicans’ “precinct strategy,” former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon tells listeners to his podcast.
“Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick. “The RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”
Read closely. Poll watching is not the same as poll working. The RNC is conflating the two here. Poll watchers are inside observers only and may only interact with the chief judge if there are problems with long lines, broken machines or other voting issues. Poll workers are paid and trained by the boards of elections as good-faith election administrators. Or, that’s the idea. It’s just not what the RNC has in mind.
Democratic National Committee spokesperson Ammar Moussa said the DNC “trains poll watchers to help every eligible voter cast a ballot,” but neither the DNC nor the state party trains poll workers. The DNC did help recruit poll workers in 2020 due to a drop-off in older workers amid the pandemic; but he says it is not currently doing so and has never trained poll workers to contest votes.
“You shouldn’t have poll workers who are reporting to political organizations what they see,” said Rick Hasen, a law and political science professor at U.C. Irvine who operates Election Law Blog. “It creates the potential for mucking things up at polling places and potentially leading to delays or disenfranchisement of voters,” especially “if [the poll workers] come in with the attitude that something is crooked with how elections are run.”
And if they find nothing crooked, Republicans mean to crook it. With a focus on Michigan for now.
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