Mother Jones - The GOP Is Recruiting An “Army” to Monitor the Vote

Republicans have recruited 200,000 poll watchers—and one in five say Trump should do “whatever it takes” to seize office.

1 hour ago
Julianne McShane
News & Engagement Writer

Two weeks from Tuesday, millions of voters across the country will fan out to polling places.

And when they do, there will reportedly be a GOP-backed, 200,000-strong army of volunteers watching them. Their task? “Establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should former president Donald Trump lose.

That’s according to a new report in the New Yorker that sheds light on the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s plan—led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and Michael Whatley, its co-chairs—to use a giant grassroots group of Trump worshippers to question the integrity of the election.

In June, the RNC announced that the so-called “Protect the Vote” tour would make a series of stops in swing states to “train volunteers to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat this November.” (Never mind that research shows voter fraud is quite rare; that Republican-led gerrymandering has helped enshrine minority rule, as my colleague Ari Berman has covered; and that Trump still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election—despite more than 60 failed legal challenges affirming that he did.)

According to the New Yorker, much of the RNC’s strategy relies on indulging supporters’ paranoia over conspiracy theories about a Democrat-coordinated campaign to steal the election—via the usual suspects, undocumented immigrants and dead people—and training volunteers to be “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign,” as far-right Internet personality Jack Posobiec put it. If they suspect fraud, the volunteers are told, they should call the RNC’s “election integrity hotline,” which a team of volunteer attorneys will apparently answer.

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