The Washington Post details the GOP’s efforts to recruit both poll workers and poll watchers, with the aim of looking for irregularities. Obviously, it will be worrisome if these recruits fabricate bogus claims of election fraud comparable to Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen. But Democrats, in my judgment, should be careful about not becoming overly alarmist about GOP efforts to monitor future elections. It will be essential to have Republican candidates and voters accept the results of elections that they lose in the future, and the best way to have that happen in this unfortunate climate of hyper-distrust is for Republicans to have had the opportunity to see for themselves that nothing improper actually affected the outcomes.

It’s going to be impossible to convince every last Trump-influenced election denialist that their candidates lost free and fair elections. Still, for competitive elections to be at all possible, it’s going to be necessary to convert a significant percentage of current election denialists back to being election realists. Giving them reasonable opportunities to observe the process will be a key component of this conversion effort.