Let me count the ways
Good heavens, this garbled mess from RNC co-chair Lara Trump.
“We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… So there was a moratorium for about 40 years on the RNC actually training people to work in these polling locations and the tabulation centers where the mail-in ballots come in. And last year, the judge who implemented that passed away, so that was lifted.”
“Poll observers are NEVER permitted to touch ballots,” tweets exasperated Democratic election protection attorney Marc Elias. “She is suggesting the RNC will infiltrate election offices.”
Observers physically handling ballots is BS, as Elias points out. But she’s just getting started on the wrongness.
First, some terminology. Poll watchers or observers are citizens pre-approved to be present inside a polling location as observers during voting. At most (at least in my state), they may bring to the attention of the chief judge any observed infractions or misapplication of voting rules, and that’s all. They are to sit quietly. No interactions with voters, verbal or physical. Poll workers are citizens approved and hired to administaer the actual election, issue ballots, check IDs, etc. Poll greeters or electioneers are political operatives who may interact with voters only outside the polling location’s marked electioneering boundaries.
The “moratorium” Lara Trump mentions was a standing court order enforcing a 1982 consent decree between the RNC and DNC. It limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in “ballot security” efforts without prior court approval. The RNC sued to get the decree rescinded after the election of Barack Obama. Third Circuit Appeals Court Judge Joseph Greenaway in his ruling noted, “the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.”
The RNC was never prohibited from appointing poll watchers, and did. Among other requirements, the RNC was probibited from engaging in a through g above. Observing vote counting has always been allowed, to my knowledge. I’ve watched mailed-in ballots be approved plenty of times.
I don’t have time to bird dog all of this, but per Wikpedia, Greenaway, 66, retired in 2023. He is still alive. District Court Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise issued the original 1982 ruling. He died in office in 2015, not last year. U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez (still alive) allowed the consent decree to expire in December 2017. Debevoise expiring had nothing to do with it.
Like her father-in-law, Lara Trump is way out of her depth.
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