True the Vote and their affiliates are notorious for drawing harassment complaints for their unwelcome and unlicensed “policing” of black and Latino polling sites in Houston, Texas, and beyond. I personally watched and reported Republican Party-affiliated and True the Vote-affiliated poll watchers prove themselves a nuisance for black voters in Florida in 2012. There, the poll watchers challenged and reported NAACP activists who offered water and chairs to voters standing in long poll lines under the hot Florida sun. In Denver, a poll watcher called in a fraud alert simply for seeing a “high concentration of people of color” at a polling site.
It’s not just people of color who’ve been targeted. In 2012, a True the Vote training manual was flagged for containing materials that would lead observers to single out suspected transgender individuals for voter fraud.
Trump’s 2016 poll watchers could be even worse. At least True the Vote offered some semblance of poll-watcher training. The people who heed Trump’s challenges to watch “certain areas” seem propelled by unmitigated anger and racial animus, especially if the Boston Globe report is any true representative sample. The rancorous Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, one of Trump’s fondest acolytes—and no friend of black folks—is literally calling for “pitchforks and torches.”