Sean Morales-Doyle oped in the LA Times:

In the years since, Trump’s ragtag gang of election deniers has built a movement, organizing everyday American citizens to take democracy down. Cleta Mitchell — one of the lawyers on the January 2021 call in which Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to revise the vote in his favor — has assembled the Election Integrity Network, which has some 30 state chapters and weekly Zoom calls. This year Mitchell created the Only Citizens Vote coalition, which she has likened to a “national neighborhood watch” over elections. Mitchell’s network was initially backed by the Conservative Partnership Institute, where former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is a senior partner and which has reportedly contributed to an online system to enable mass challenges of voters. Stephen K. Bannon, a close ally of Trump, uses his radio show to encourage those who don’t believe in elections to sign up to be poll watchers, part of efforts to start “taking over all the elections.”

In this twisted inversion of a healthy, functioning democracy, these activists harass volunteers registering Latino voters with discriminatory accusations that they are signing up noncitizens to vote. Some have joined right-wing groups that challenge their neighbors’ right to vote based on dubious “investigations,” or conduct canvassing to scrutinize voter rolls. In Pennsylvania, volunteer activists sent mailers encouraging voters suspected of moving to cancel their voter registration, confusing and alarming recipients.

Although these activists often insist they are helping officials ensure fair voting, they are effectively doing the opposite — intimidating voters and interfering in elections. Rather than stop actual fraud, these efforts are far more likely to scare eligible voters away from voting or remove them from the rolls based on faulty data. The targeting of Latino registration drives, and the focus of some activists on scrutinizing voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names,” are reminders that disenfranchisement is especially likely for voters of color. Moreover, an unprecedented surge of Americans hear this call to antidemocratic vigilantism as an invitation to harass and threaten election offici