- GOP groups are training an "army" of election workers for 2022 and 2024, per Politico and NYT.
- Conservative leaders are aiming to build a connected network between poll workers and party lawyers.
- Workers with an explicitly partisan agenda could deliberately cause chaos at the polls.
Republican-led groups are training "an army" of GOP activists to serve as election workers, according to reports in Politico and The New York Times.
Leaders of such groups detailed their plans in several meetings and training sessions, recordings of which were obtained by Politico.
"Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger," Matthew Seirfried, who leads the Republican National Committee's election integrity efforts in Michigan, said in one recording obtained by Politico.
Campaigns from both political parties routinely recruit and train poll watchers to observe the voting process at the polls on Election Day, and also assemble teams of elections lawyers at the ready in case of a close election or recount.
Election officials in many states, like Michigan, legally required to recruit volunteer election workers from both parties.
Republicans describe their election integrity investments as an effort to keep pace with Democrats.
"Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they're terrified of an even playing field," Gates McGavick, a spokesperson for the RNC, told Politico. "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."
But the plans by Republican activists to recruit election workers in charge of running the election process — and be in close contact with local law enforcement — would mark a new frontier in election administration and possibly engender more partisan interference in the voting process.
"This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together," Nick Penniman, CEO of campaign finance and democracy group Issue One, told Politico. "It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone."
One aim of the Michigan efforts are to create a direct line between Republican election workers and party lawyers, Seifreid said in one recording of a March meeting obtained by Politico, saying, "it's going to be an army."
"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 said in one October meeting, per Politico.
Tim Griffin, a counsel for the conservative legal group the Amistad Project, discussed how "we're trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network" in another recording of a September 2021 event obtained by the outlet.
"Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman," Griffin said in the recording. "They're the ones that can seat a grand jury. They're the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, et cetera."
In audio of another meeting in March, Seifreid said, "We're going to have lawyers that work to build relationships with different judges so that when that happens, we're going to have lawyers that have relationships with the police chiefs in the different areas."
Such plans could exacerbate pressures and intimidation of state and local election officials, who have already faced mounting levels of harassment and threats as a result of President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn his election loss.
Primaries later in the year in states like Michigan and Arizona will prove an early test of whether trained, partisan election workers will make in impact in the primaries.
In 2020, the Trump campaign boasted of assembling a sophisticated poll watching option that largely failed to materialize across the country, although Republican election observers got into clashes with officials at vote-counting centers in big cities like Philadelphia and Detroit.
The Trump campaign also lost over 50 lawsuits, including ones relying on affidavits from partisan poll watchers, seeking to halt the counting of votes, the disqualification of ballots, and blocking the certification of election results.
In a worst-case scenario, experts told Politico that election workers operating under a partisan agenda could deliberately cause chaos or raise spurious allegations of fraud at polling places in the hopes of throwing the election into the hands of partisan officials.
"The real hope is that you can throw the choosing of electors to state legislatures," Penniman argued to Politico.
Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell and her group, the Election Integrity Network, is leading similar efforts to recruit and train "a volunteer army of citizens," The Times reported on Monday.
Mitchell, a longtime election lawyer and fixture in conservative circles, introduced Trump to John Eastman, a conservative legal scholar. She was present on the infamous January 2 phone call where Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" him 11,780 votes and spoke to Trump at least once on the day of the January 6 insurrection.
In her seminars, according to The Times, Mitchell trains activists to work on the inside as poll workers, serve as election observers, and file public records requests — a source of increasing administrative strain and burdens on election officials — to determine whether officials are "friend or foe."