Will the US poll watchers become election intimidators?

Republican Tim Waters is among tens of thousands of poll watchers his party is sending to monitor voting in the US presidential election in two weeks. The 63-year-old also happens to believe Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory that the results could be rigged.

Waters will join other observers in Georgia, one of seven swing states expected to decide the outcome of the tight November 5 election between Trump and Kamala Harris.

“I’m very cynical about the situation. I just don’t trust it,” Waters, who chairs his local Republican Party, told AFP. “They are going to try to cheat like in the last election.”

The Republican Party says its army of observers will “protect” the election. But Waters and many others have bought into Trump’s unprecedented campaign to refuse accepting his 2020 loss to Joe Biden and broader bid to undermine faith in US democracy.

The fact that so many poll watchers will deploy while believing Trump’s conspiracy theory raises questions over whether they will end up intimidating, rather than protecting, the process.

Waters called that “horse manure.”

He doubled down on his insistence that in the last presidential election “the people doing the intimidating” were the country’s election workers — despite no evidence that any fraud took place in a meaningful way across the huge country.

Certainly election workers — the people who run polling stations, process registrations and count ballots — are feeling fearful.

Around 34 percent of US election workers know of colleagues who have left their jobs at the polls because of concerns about safety, according to a survey published in May by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

Incidents reported by the organization include a polling observer carrying a firearm following an election worker into a ballot-counting location during the 2022 midterms in Texas.

One ballot counter testified to US lawmakers that she went into hiding after being falsely accused of fraud by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election.

‘Lots of eyes’

In Georgia’s Peach County — where Waters will be poll watching — election supervisor Anthony Sallette said he welcomed transparency, but draws the line at intimidation.

“No matter what, you are going to have some people getting upset about certain things. But as long as they don’t interfere with the voters, that’s fine,” Sallette said.

His employees are prepared to have “lots of eyes” on them, he added, working in a county that Trump narrowly won with 52 percent of votes in 2020.

Queried about intimidation concerns, Trump campaign advisor Danielle Alvarez told AFP in a statement that the Republican Party was fighting for a “fair and secure process where every legal vote is counted properly.”

Poll watchers’ rights vary by state, but US law generally permits them to observe without violating voter privacy or disrupting the election.

Democrats are also providing poll watchers this year, using a recruitment pitch that largely focuses on helping voters to cast a ballot.

Post-election lawsuits

Prominent figures in Trump’s campaign to discredit the 2020 election have resurfaced in the Republican poll watcher hiring drive.

They include lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was on a 2021 phone call with Trump when he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” so he could reverse his narrow election loss.

Trump, who was convicted in May of business fraud, has also been criminally charged in two separate cases over his alleged attempts to overturn Biden’s victory.

If the Trump campaign tries to use the courts to get this year’s results overturned, the poll watchers may have an important role.

Allegations made by Republican poll monitors were submitted in lawsuits filed in 2020 to try and challenge the results. And now the volunteers will be provided a hotline to report concerns which may then be used as evidence in post-election court cases, according to a Trump campaign official quoted by the New Yorker.

But for some Republican volunteers, such as 59-year-old Audrey Singleton, poll watching is nothing more than a “civic duty.”

The businesswoman from Georgia’s Bryan County is not convinced by the election fraud claims, telling AFP: “Unless there’s something proven, it’s a speculation.”

Jordan Givens, chair of the county’s Republican Party, also said he told his group of around 28 volunteers to avoid bringing their prejudices about fraud into this election.

“Poll watchers this year have been encouraged to put opinions aside and focus on what’s in front of them, not what happened four years ago,” he said.