Fredreka Schouten for CNN:

The Trump campaign is working to dispatch tens of thousands of election monitors to battleground states in what is shaping up as the Republican Party’s largest-ever poll-watching operation.

The party’s aggressive plans for poll-monitoring have sparked charges from Democrats and voting-rights groups that Republicans are gearing up to suppress voting in key states as President Donald Trump repeatedly claims, without evidence, that voter fraud will imperil November’s election.Republicans say their new push will allow them to protect election integrity and better coordinate their get-out-vote operations.

Both sides are headed for a legal showdown on the issue in Pennsylvania — a state Trump won in 2016 by about 44,000 votes out of 6 million cast.The Trump campaign is fighting a Pennsylvania law that restricts poll watchers to monitoring voting in the county in which they live — one of dozens of lawsuits filed by Republicans and Democrats that challenge the ground rules of a fast-approaching election that state and local officials are racing to carry out in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.