Election workers prepare to handle ‘concerning list’ of poll watchers who could disrupt the vote

(CNN) — During a special election in Wisconsin over the summer, a group of partisan poll watchers showed up at a handful of precincts in Glendale, a suburb of Milwaukee, and created chaos by contesting every absentee ballot that was cast.

After they were reminded repeatedly about the rules against making meritless ballot challenges, the groups of poll watchers “turned disruptive,” according to Glendale Mayor Bryan Kennedy.

“They refused to stop challenging, then they were asked to leave. They didn’t, and the police were called,” Kennedy told CNN, adding that once police arrived, the observers left peacefully. “It certainly gave us pause about what we’ll see later.”

Turning what are supposed to be routine scenes of counting ballots into tense standoffs that require police intervention is exactly the sort of thing that election officials across the country are hoping to avoid when Americans go to the polls next month.

After conspiracy theories about voting spread rampantly in 2020 – as Trump and his allies tried to reverse his loss to Joe Biden – officials are preparing for a possible wave of misinformation this election season and hoping it won’t be fueled by volunteers acting as observers.

Poll watchers are a key component of election transparency, and both Democrats and Republicans have built out their ranks of volunteers and lawyers to observe polling places and vote counting centers. But while Democrats have publicly focused on get-out-the-vote efforts, Republicans have made “election integrity” a centerpiece of their campaign messaging, vowing to deploy tens of thousands of people to monitor the vote across battlegrounds.

However, there may be reasons to be skeptical of the GOP’s numbers, largely because they haven’t panned out in prior elections, said Justin Levitt, a CNN contributor and election law expert at Loyola Law School who served as a voting rights adviser in the Biden White House.

“It serves a fundraising purpose and an intimidation purpose, but the actual people never show,” Levitt said. “Think about the words that are used – armies, hoards – it communicates that you’re going to have to run a gauntlet to be able to vote, and I don’t think that’s true. For the vast majority of Americans, it’s pretty smooth.”

Across the country, election officials are also vowing voters will be able to safely cast their ballots. Election offices have ramped up their security preparations, driven by soaring election skepticism and threats against election workers. Some election hubs have added bulletproof glass, workers have wearable panic buttons and election staff have forged open lines of communication with local law enforcement.

This year’s crop of election observers is set to include people who have denied Trump’s 2020 election loss.

The election observers in Glendale who were removed by police were “known actors” to officials there, Kennedy said. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, one of the observers who registered was charged in 2022 with fraudulently requesting absentee ballots to try to prove fraud, while another was warned in 2023 to cease “stalking behavior” toward a state elections official.

In Georgia, the Republican Party has tapped a handful of election skeptics as statewide poll watchers, including Mark Amick and William Bradley Carver, who both signed on as alternate electors for Trump in 2020. (Neither Amick nor Carver were charged with any crimes.)

Also on the Republican poll watcher list is Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair who spread falsehoods about the 2020 election and expressed doubt about the results.

The inclusion of individuals directly involved in efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election highlights the challenge that election officials across the country may face with tens of thousands of election observers who monitor polling places and ballot counting centers.

“It’s a rather concerning list,” said Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director for the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit civic engagement organization. “There is definitely an effort to get people who do not trust this election system and who are going to be looking for issues and who may very well be ready to jump in to cause problems for voters instead of being there to help protect voters.”

When reached for comment, Grubbs said CNN was “trying to create a narrative that is ginning up a lot of issues that don’t exist.”

Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor for the Trump Campaign and the RNC, applauded the volunteers that have been recruited so far to monitor the polls, calling them “patriots.”

“While Democrats will stop at nothing to weaken our elections, we are fighting for a fair and secure process where every legal vote is counted properly - and in November, Americans confidently will send President Trump back to the White House,” Alvarez said.

Carver and Amick did not respond to requests for comment.

‘The more eyes and ears we have the better’

The Republican National Committee and a sprawling network of conservative groups have made a concerted effort ahead of the presidential election to try to recruit what they say will be an army of election observers, including many who doubted the 2020 results. The RNC has pledged to deploy tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor vote counting across battlegrounds.

“I would rather have a police car parked in front of a storefront window than call them after a rocket’s thrown through it,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a right-wing podcast interview earlier this month. “Once an election is certified, there is nothing you can do. So, we are going to be there before the voting starts. We’re going to be there while the voting is going on, and we’re going to be there when they’re counting those votes to make sure that everything is going to be straight up.”

Conservative groups run by prominent election deniers have echoed the RNC’s calls.

“You need to sign up and be an election worker, be an observer. If you’re a lawyer, volunteer to be in the war rooms,” said conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell of the Election Integrity Network, who was involved in efforts to try to upend the 2020 results. “The more eyes and ears we have the better.”

As they prepare to face Republicans who’ve openly questioned the election system, the Democrats have taken up the mantle of cheerleaders for the existing election infrastructure and are preparing to deploy their own force of poll watchers and attorneys across battleground states.

“If you plan to vote at the polls on Election Day, you may have heard Republican threats to send people to polling sites to intimidate voters who vote Democrat,” Dana Remus, outside counsel for the Kamala Harris campaign, and DNC official Monica Guardiola wrote in a recent campaign memo obtained by CNN. “To those voters: We are ready to ensure you will be able to safely vote.”

Learning de-escalation techniques and how voting works

Each state has different rules and laws surrounding poll watchers, which dictate how close they can stand, how they can or cannot interact with voters and how they can challenge ballots. The rules in Wisconsin are loosely defined and largely left up to municipal clerks to enforce.

In a signal of the added preparation election offices are taking ahead of November, Milwaukee for the first time held trainings this year for election workers that included sessions on de-escalation techniques, when to contact the police for an election incident and the process for polling site chiefs to remove individuals who may try to disrupt voting, according to a city spokesperson.

Elena Hilby, the city clerk in Sun Prairie and president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, said the state’s clerks have revamped their election plans and conducted extra trainings this year to prepare for all sorts of potential issues that could arise with observers.

Hilby stressed that it’s often important for poll watchers to understand what they’re seeing. On Tuesday, the state’s first day of early voting, Sun Prairie’s absentee voting box had to be emptied twice in the first four hours because it was full, she said. After they’re emptied, the ballots are sorted so they can be sent to the city’s eight voting precincts to be counted on Election Day.

“That’s a process that just looks funny. … So you go grab your observers and say, ‘The ballot box is full. Would you like to see how we do this in a secure manner?’” Hilby said. “We’re not doing anything different than what we’ve done before – it’s just now everyone is interested in what we do.”

Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, said that observers are an important part of the process to help assure the public that elections are safe and secure.

“Lack of understanding breeds confusion, and confusion breeds conspiracy,” Cohen said. “The best way to combat it is to just be as transparent as possible, and election officials really are committed to doing that. That’s by law but also by design to make sure people can feel confident with what’s happening.”

“It helps people better understand that what they’re seeing is not part of a grand conspiracy but well-documented procedure and process,” she added.

Concerns about misinformation

Officials in other swing states said they are expecting minimal fireworks from partisan observers but remain concerned about the potential impact of misinformation campaigns.

“I don’t really have any concerns about the actual poll watchers and observers,” said Lisa Deeley, a Democrat and the vice chair of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, which oversees elections. “There have been observers of all the parties that have harmoniously sat in the observing area for hours on end watching the process of the counting of the ballots.”

Still, officials have participated in a series of tabletop exercises to prepare for any number of scenarios.

“We spend a lot of time doing tabletop exercises and talking about circumstances or instances that could occur and how do we handle that,” Deeley said, “They proved to be so beneficial to us in 2020 that we’ve kept it up.”

In the run-up to 2020, officials were contending with implementing no-excuse absentee voting for the first time, grappling with a global pandemic and contending with curfews and civil unrest. As the election got underway, Trump falsely claimed GOP poll watchers were thrown out of voting sites and later claimed votes were “created out of thin air.”

“What happens is somebody creeps in with a bad story on social media saying they’re not letting anybody watch the count in Philadelphia,” Deeley said. “The person could be nowhere near where the count is taking place.”

In Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel said earlier this month that the state won’t have officers in polling places but that they would be close by.

“We run tabletop exercises to make sure that we’re contemplating or anticipating any set of circumstances,” Nessel said. “You’re not going to see police officers right there in your polling precinct. We do that intentionally because we don’t ever want a situation where anyone feels you know, threatened or intimidated, but we are going to make sure that we have law enforcement nearby just in case anything arises.”

If an election observer tries to disrupt voting at a polling place, there are clear protocols to follow. But one of the thorniest problems is figuring out how to disarm disinformation, wherever it originates.

“In the moment if someone gets out of hand, if someone gets threatening, staff can handle that,” Jackson Ali said. “It’s the narrative that’s created afterwards that can cause years of issues.”

“I don’t know that any of us can be fully prepared for what happens afterwards because once a lie begins there’s really not much you can do to stop it,” she said, “especially when people are ready to inflame that.”

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