'Stop the steal' supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers
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[October 13, 2022]
By Ned Parker, Linda So and Moira Warburton
(Reuters) - Inside the El Paso County
clerk's office in Colorado, where officials had gathered in July to
recount votes in a Republican nominating contest for this year's
midterms, dozens of angry election watchers pounded on the windows, at
times yelling at workers and recording them with cell phones.
In the hallway a group prayed for "evil to descend" on the "election
team," said the county's Republican clerk Chuck Broerman. "It's
astonishing to me to hear something like that." The election watchers
had showed up to observe a five-day recount of votes for four Republican
candidates who claimed the primary was fraudulent in a contest where
they faced other Republicans.
Protesters had mobilized outside the clerk's office, holding signs with
the signature "Stop the Steal" slogan of former President Donald Trump
and demanding the county get rid of its voting machines.
As the United States enters the final stretch to November’s midterm
elections, Reuters documented multiple incidents of intimidation
involving an expanding army of election observers, many of them
recruited by prominent Republican Party figures and activists echoing
Trump's false theories about election fraud. The widespread voter fraud
in the 2020 election as alleged by Trump and his supporters was never
proven.
Interviews with more than two dozen election officials as well as
representatives of groups driven by false theories about election fraud,
and an examination of poll-watching training materials, revealed an
intensifying grassroots effort to recruit activists. This has heightened
alarm that disturbances in this year's primary contests could foreshadow
problems in November's local, state and national races.
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Officials and experts worry the campaign will deepen the distrust about
America's election process and lead to further harassment and threats to
already besieged election workers.
Election officials in three other states -- North Carolina, Arizona and
Nevada -- reported similar incidents. In 16 North Carolina counties
alone, officials noted unusually aggressive observers during May's
primary elections, according to a state election board survey. Some
attempted to take photographs of sensitive voting equipment or
intimidated voters at polling places, in violation of North Carolina's
election laws.
During early voting in Arizona's Pima County, an election observer was
told to put away binoculars; another was caught looking at private voter
data, and another was asked to stop making comments about “fraudulent
elections,” according to a September report by the county recorder's
office reviewed by Reuters. State law forbids voter intimidation and
obstructing election workers.
Pima county recorder Gabriella Cazares-Kelly said her election staff
received multiple complaints from voters that individuals were shouting
at them from outside the 75-foot circumference around polling stations,
where interaction with voters is banned. "The concern is it makes them
feel unwelcome," said Cazares-Kelly.
In Nevada's Washoe County, people with night vision goggles stood
outside the registrar's building and aimed their cameras at election
workers counting votes on primary night in June, two Washoe County
officials told Reuters.
Poll watchers have been a feature of American democracy since the 18th
century, recruited by parties and candidates and regulated by state laws
and local rules. People from both parties keep an eye on the voting -
and each other - to make sure things go smoothly. In some places, poll
“watchers” are different from “challengers,” who can point out people
they suspect aren't legal voters. In other states, poll watchers also do
the challenging.
Groups that question the legitimacy of the 2020 vote have helped recruit
thousands of observers who support dramatic changes to how Americans
vote, including doing away with voting machines and returning to
hand-counted paper ballots.
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Officials say they are concerned observers intent on rooting out
so-called voter fraud could cause unnecessary disruptions and long lines
at polling places on Election Day.
"It's a real concern," said Al Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city
commissioner who received death threats after the 2020 election for
refuting false claims of voter fraud. "If these people show up to the
polls with the intention of disrupting voting from taking place, then I
can't imagine a worse threat to democracy than that."
Sandy Kiesel, who heads the Election Integrity Force in Michigan, said
her poll "challengers" will be trained to be "polite, respectful and to
obey the law.
"We're not about trying to hassle poll workers," Kiesel told Reuters.
"It's about transparency. If we can all see what's going on, maybe we
wouldn't have these arguments whether elections are free and fair."
REPUBLICAN SUPPORT
In early October, an election-denying group called Audit the Vote PA
held a Zoom meeting with almost 80 people that was billed as a "deep
dive" poll watcher training session. The Pennsylvania group says
Democrat Joe Biden's 2020 win in the state was illegitimate.
During the call, which Reuters attended, participants compared notes on
how to observe the testing of voting machines and when a hand count of
votes can be requested, and discussed the legality of taking photographs
in polling locations.
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![](../images/101322PIX/news_l15.jpg)
A supporter of President Donald
Trump holds a sign stating "STOP THE STEAL" and a pin stating "Poll
Watcher" after Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden overtook
President Donald Trump in the Pennsylvania general election vote
count across the street from where ballots are being counted, three
days after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, U.S. November 6, 2020. REUTERS/Mark Makela/File Photo
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2022/Oct/13/images/ads/current/state_bank_lda_PPP_2022.png)
Toni Shuppe, Audit the Vote's CEO, declined multiple requests for an
interview with Reuters, but confirmed the group is "focused on
encouraging people to become poll watchers in the upcoming November
midterms elections."
Andrea Raffle, the Republican National Committee's director for
election integrity in Pennsylvania, told participants on the call
they had already filled 6,000 poll watcher positions in the state
this year, compared with 1,000 in 2020. Raffle referred a request
for comment to the RNC's national office.
Election conspiracy groups also often appear at events with
Republican officials, focused on recruiting volunteers to help watch
the polls, according to the groups themselves and county officials.
The Republican Party said it welcomes volunteers from many different
groups, expects them to respect the law and to follow the party's
training. "Our program is independent of anything else," said RNC
spokesperson Danielle Alvarez.
The RNC has been pouring resources into recruiting observers and
workers since being freed from the restrictions of a court-ordered
consent decree in 2018. It expects to have trained over 52,000 poll
watchers and workers between November last year and the coming
election; it said comparative numbers for past elections were
unavailable. The consent decree, which sharply limited the party's
ability to challenge voters' qualifications, was put in place after
the RNC, during a 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey, engaged in
intimidation tactics targeted at minority voters.
A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said they did not
have a national number because state party offices manage their poll
watcher recruitment. But the DNC says it has hired five staffers to
work in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Texas to
counter efforts to subvert the electoral process, including ballot
counting and the certification of results.
GROWING NUMBERS IN NORTH CAROLINA
In North Carolina's rural Henderson County, as voters cast ballots
in May's primary elections, aggressive groups turned up.
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Observers demanded to inspect voting machine tabulators in violation
of state election laws. Others repeatedly grilled poll workers or
demanded to take pictures inside voting stations. When told to stop,
they said they were following guidance from a Republican Party
lawyer, said Henderson County Election Director Karen Hebb.
"It was stressful," she said. "If we refused to let the observers do
something, they said you know you can be sued if you don't allow
us."
She contacted the sheriff's department after an observer trailed a
poll worker's car from a polling site to the election board. She
said the sheriff's office told her no laws had been broken. The
Henderson County Sheriff's Office did not respond to requests for
comment.
In typical years, eight to 10 observers each from the Democrat and
Republican parties would observe the county's elections, Hebb said.
This year, she had nearly 30 Republican Party observers alone,
compared to the usual number of Democrats.
Some of the Republican observers later identified themselves as
members of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group
linked to a nationwide effort led by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a
longtime Republican election lawyer and promoter of voter fraud
theories who joined Trump's legal team in his effort to overturn the
result of the 2020 elections.
As head of the Election Integrity Network, Mitchell is training
election observers and is trying to build grassroots networks of
conservatives ahead of the midterms. In the first six months of
2022, her network hosted a series of training sessions for activists
in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina,
Georgia, Florida and Arizona.
Although Mitchell and other activists say the effort is nonpartisan,
the project is funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a
Washington nonprofit organization with deep ties to Trump's
political network. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is
listed as the organization’s “senior partner.” Trump’s political
action committee, Save America, gave the group $1 million in 2021,
campaign finance records show. Meadows and Mitchell did not return
requests for comment.
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The prospect of scores of unofficial observers turning up at polls
already convinced the election system is rigged and assuming
election officials are corrupt is a "tinder box" that could easily
explode, said Chris Harvey, Georgia’s election director in 2020.
"People are passionate about politics, and if there's anger and
confrontation at the polls, it gets ugly and really dangerous really
quickly," he said.
(Reporting by Ned Parker, Joseph Tanfani, Linda So and Moira
Warburton; Additional reporting by Tim Reid Editing by Jason Szep,
Ross Colvin and Chris Sanders)
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