The Republican National Committee and its allies say they have staged thousands of training sessions around the country on how to monitor voting and lodge complaints about next month’s midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, party officials have boasted about swelling the ranks of poll watchers to six times the total from 2020. In Michigan, a right-wing group announced it had launched “Operation Overwatch” to hunt down election-related malfeasance, issuing a press release that repeated the warning “We are watching” 10 times.
Supporters of former president Donald Trump who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen have summoned a swarm of poll watchers and workers in battleground states to spot potential fraud this year. It is a call to action that could subject voting results around the country to an unprecedented level of suspicion and unfounded doubt.
“We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, OK?” one-time Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said on a recent episode of his podcast. “We don’t care if you don’t like it. We don’t care if you’re going to run around and light your hair on fire. That’s the way this is going to roll.”
Whether the flood-the-zone approach will materialize remains to be seen. Election officials will not know until Election Day how many poll watchers will turn up, making it impossible to be sure whether there will be a surge in volunteers. In battleground states like Arizona and Wisconsin, many Republicans who have said they would serve as poll workers have not taken any shifts.
But the appeal from GOP figures who deny the results of the last presidential vote has created a dilemma for election officials, who rely on ordinary citizens to do the grunt work of democracy — checking in voters, for instance, or opening absentee ballots — but now fear some of those who show up could become agents of disruption.