National and state GOP officials are slowly ramping up recruitment and plans for what they say will be an “unprecedented” Election Day army of 100,000 election workers, monitors and lawyers.
A Republican National Committee official told NBC News that the organization has already recruited “tens of thousands” of people to serve in these roles and has hired paid election integrity directors in 13 states, including in key battleground states, to oversee volunteers. Weekly trainings are underway, the official said, as the party focuses on one of former President Donald Trump’s favorite issues, election integrity, five months before the 2024 vote.
But the party has provided few details about its plans, as critics argue that a 100,000-strong force to combat the fictional enemy of widespread voter fraud is overly aspirational. In interviews, state and national Republican officials repeatedly refused to provide specific details about recruitment, training activities and deployment plans.
Officials said the 100,000 figure is a goal for their national force and that they are recruiting volunteers through local parties and the RNC-run website Protectthevote.com. An RNC official said the party will focus heavily on bolstering volunteer ranks in seven swing states in particular: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. Supporters interested in working the polls are also being directed to local election officials as the RNC seeks to ensure more Republicans are working the polls and counting votes.
Some states — including Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Virginia — have election worker parity requirements, which seek to force officials to hire equal members of both parties. In materials shared with donors, the RNC boasted about filing complaints and lawsuits in Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada to try to get more Republicans to vote.
“Our unprecedented effort is in full swing for the primaries and continues to ramp up for November 5th. Every American deserves a system where it’s easy to vote and hard to cheat, and our team will ensure every vote is counted legally and fairly,” said Gineen Bresso, director of election integrity for the RNC and the Trump campaign.
But Democrats with experience working closely with voter protection efforts argued that the RNC is overstating its work and said they were skeptical that Republicans could actually recruit so many people to monitor the polls for fraud.
“Every two years we see a different fictional number, and every two years the actual number of people who show up isn’t even close,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor and former White House democracy adviser to President Joe Biden. “They were never able to get even a fraction of that number.”
Levitt, who ran the voter protection campaign for Barack Obama’s 2008 candidacy, said the campaign “did very well and got tens of thousands” of volunteers and lawyers to answer questions and resolve problems that arose. It will be harder, he argued, to recruit people to look for voter fraud because it is extremely rare.
After Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in March, the RNC’s election integrity work intensified. The party launched a series of lawsuits arguing that voter rolls in certain swing states were bloated and staffed by election lawyers. In April, the RNC promised deploy an army of supporters on Election Day to “protect the vote and ensure a big victory” in November.
In early May, the RNC told donors that it was implementing a permanent, full-time Election Integrity Department, boasting that it would go to court to defend voting restrictions, such as voter ID, that had been implemented by Republican legislatures. across the country in recent years.
As for its volunteer army, Republican officials in many of the seven states the RNC is targeting have remained largely vague about the progress of recruiting volunteers and about what specific tasks they would be dispatched to perform.
In Wisconsin, state Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming said volunteers will likely be deployed not only as poll workers and poll monitors but also to monitor voter boxes if the state Supreme Court decides, as many expect it will, to expand its use in the future state. of the November elections.
Schimming predicted there will be “thousands” of poll workers and election observers, as well as “hundreds” of practicing attorneys in Wisconsin by the time early voting begins in the state. He said the “base” was created during the state GOP recruitment program last fall, when officials recruited 5,500 volunteers they could tap.
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for Trump’s coordinated campaign in Michigan, said that GOP officials in the state were “recruiting across the country” for volunteer roles and that “our election integrity teams are working every day to recruit and train people.”
But she declined to provide specific recruiting numbers, she wrote in an email, “because it would be like asking the University of Michigan to share its playbook with Ohio State before the big game.”
North Carolina Republican Party spokesman Matt Mercer said the state party was “committed to building on election integrity efforts in 2020 and 2022 to ensure elections in our state are safe, secure, fair and transparent.” ” and that the state party was “actively involved and engaged at all levels of the electoral process.” But when pressed to provide details on recruitment and other forward-looking logistics regarding election integrity, a North Carolina Republican Party official declined to provide specifics, saying the “methods and metrics we are using are proprietary information.”
Spokespeople for the state Republican parties in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada declined to answer questions about their recruitment efforts and election integrity programs, while a spokesperson for the Georgia Republican Party did not respond to questions.
Republican officials in many of these swing states also pointed to a growing mountain of election litigation that the party was leading as part of a broader effort.
In March, the Nevada Republican Party and the RNC jointly filed a lawsuit alleging that the state’s voter rolls were “inflated” and that Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, was not “adequately maintaining” the state’s voter rolls.” They filed another lawsuit last month challenging a state rule that allows mail-in ballots to be accepted up to four days after Election Day, claiming the deadline violates federal law, and one more suit on Monday disputing the count of mail-in ballots received after Election Day without a postmark in Nevada.
The RNC and Michigan Republican Party have filed similar lawsuits in March and May, alleging “inflated” and “inaccurate” voter lists, as well as “illegal” guidance on signature verification practices for voters who vote absentee.
And in North Carolina, the state Republican Party along with the RNC sued last month to demand stricter rules on accepting mail-in ballots, as well as what forms of identification must be presented, in accordance with state voter identification laws.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
