Source: Politics<\/p>\n
Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.<\/p>\n
The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,\u201d said Matthew Seifried, the RNC\u2019s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.<\/p>\n
Backing up those front-line workers, \u201cit\u2019s going to be an army,\u201d Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have more lawyers than we\u2019ve ever recruited, because let\u2019s be honest, that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be fought, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
Seifried also said the RNC will hold \u201cworkshops\u201d and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May, 2022 training session, he said he\u2019d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.<\/p>\n
Democrat Janice Winfrey, who serves as the clerk, would be bound to pick names from the list submitted by the party under a local law intended to ensure bipartisan representation and an unbiased team of precinct workers.<\/p>\n
Separately, POLITICO obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, an self-described election-integrity group that Donald Trump\u2019s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a \u201cpartner\u201d in the Trump campaign\u2019s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election<\/a>, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.<\/p>\n On the recording, Griffin speaks of building a nationwide network of district attorney allies and how to create a legal \u201ctrap\u201d for Winfrey.<\/p>\n \u201cRemember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,\u201d Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. \u201cThey’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n POLITICO obtained about a dozen recordings from people who were invited to listen to the meetings. Seifried referred POLITICO\u2019s requests for comment to the RNC. Griffin, through the Thomas More Society, which runs Amistad, did not return repeated calls and texts to spokesperson Tom Ciesielka.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the RNC said the party is attempting to rectify an imbalance in favor of Democratic election workers in large urban areas, particularly Detroit, a city that votes reliably Democratic by more than 90 percent. Just 170 of more than 5,400 Detroit election officials were Republicans in 2020, according to the RNC.<\/p>\n “Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,\u201d said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick. \u201cThe RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”<\/p>\n In the introduction graphic on his training presentation, Seifried says the RNC\u2019s goal is to \u201cmake it easy to vote and HARD TO CHEAT.\u201d<\/p>\n But election watchdog groups and legal experts say many of these recruits are answering the RNC\u2019s call because they falsely believe fraud was committed in the 2020 election, so installing them as the supposedly unbiased officials who oversee voting at the precinct level could create chaos in such heavily Democratic precincts.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together,\u201d said Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, an election watchdog group. \u201cIt looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Penniman also expressed concern about the quick-strike networks of lawyers and DAs being created, suggesting that politically motivated poll workers could simply initiate a legal conflict at the polling place that disrupts voting and then use it as a vehicle for rejecting vote counts from that precinct.<\/p>\n Democratic National Committee spokesperson Ammar Moussa said the DNC \u201ctrains poll watchers to help every eligible voter cast a ballot,\u201d but neither the DNC nor the state party trains poll workers. The DNC did help recruit poll workers in 2020 due to a drop-off in older workers amid the pandemic; but he says it is not currently doing so and has never trained poll workers to contest votes.<\/p>\n On the tapes, some of the would-be poll workers lamented that fraud was committed in 2020 and that the election was \u201ccorrupt.\u201d Installing party loyalists on the Board of Canvassers, which is responsible for certifying the election, also appears to be part of the GOP strategy. In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Republicans nominated to their board a man who said he would not have certified the 2020 election<\/a>.<\/p>\n Both Penniman and Rick Hasen, a law and political science professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said they see a domino effect that could sow doubts about the election even when there was no original infraction: A politically motivated poll worker connecting with a zealous local lawyer to disrupt voting, followed by a challenge to the Board of Canvassers that may have nothing to do with the underlying dispute but merely the level of disruption at the polling place.<\/p>\n \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t have poll workers who are reporting to political organizations what they see,\u201d Hasen said. \u201cIt creates the potential for mucking things up at polling places and potentially leading to delays or disenfranchisement of voters,\u201d especially \u201cif [the poll workers] come in with the attitude that something is crooked with how elections are run.\u201d<\/p>\n The recordings are among the first windows into what former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon, who\u2019s been urging listeners to his podcast to take on election leadership positions<\/a>, calls \u201cthe precinct strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n But Penniman, the election watchdog, believes the strategy is designed to create enough disputes to justify intervention by GOP-controlled state legislatures, who declined to take such steps in 2020.<\/p>\n \u201cCome election day you create massive failure of certification\u201d in Democratic precincts, Penniman said. \u201cThe real hope is that you can throw the choosing of electors to state legislatures.\u201d<\/p>\n Participants in the recorded training sessions said their goal is to root out fraud, not just achieve more Republican poll workers in majority Democratic precincts.<\/p>\n Among panelists at a May 14 \u201cElection Integrity\u201d summit in Detroit was Jacky Eubanks, a Trump-endorsed state house candidate who warned \u201ckids my age who are communists do and will staff our elections\u201d in urging Republicans to become \u201cpaid, full-time elections workers\u201d to police absentee ballot signatures, according to a recording of the summit.<\/p>\n Speaking separately to Macomb County Republicans, Eubanks also recently said, \u201cThe election system is rigged, and who best to steal it but our clerks.\u201d<\/p>\n During the May 14 election-integrity summit, Seifried said the party is now actively recruiting lawyers and that he wanted to \u201cstart reaching out to law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n Patrick Colbeck, a former member of the Michigan state Senate and former gubernatorial candidate, said at the same summit that he is \u201cworking with another organization right now\u201d on \u201cdeveloping a kit for law enforcement\u201d because many don\u2019t understand election law and it will give them \u201ctools that identify and enforce election fraud more effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n Eubanks did not respond to requests for comment. In an email to POLITICO, Colbeck said there should be \u201cregular training\u201d for law enforcement on election laws.<\/p>\n A central theater for the party\u2019s \u201celection integrity\u201d organizing, Michigan is among a number of battleground states where party loyalists are being groomed to serve as inspectors in the next presidential election. Seifried estimated the RNC is committing $35 million to election integrity efforts nationwide, similar to what it spent in the last cycle in battleground state efforts. He is one of 16 state directors.<\/p>\n For decades, the RNC was barred from so-called \u201cballot security\u201d measures after it settled an early 1980s case in which it was accused of voter suppression<\/a> in violation of the Voting Rights Act, including sending armed police officers off duty to polling places in minority areas. In 2018, a federal judge allowed that consent decree to expire.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 2020 election would have been the first year that the RNC could have done anything with election integrity,\u201d said Seifried in the tapes.<\/p>\n Of all former President Donald Trump\u2019s battleground-state allies, Republican operatives in the state of Michigan came the closest to throwing the 2020 election \u2014 and the nation \u2014 into a constitutional crisis. So many volunteer challengers overwhelmed Detroit\u2019s TCF Center<\/a>, where votes were being counted, that police intervened because Covid safety protocols had been breached.<\/p>\n The poll watchers accused poll workers of \u201cbullying\u201d them and blocking them from voting tables due to pandemic social distancing requirements. They also falsely alleged \u201cphony ballots\u201d were smuggled into the center, helping lay the predicate for a weeks-long delay in certifying the state\u2019s electoral votes. That\u2019s despite the fact that then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden had won the state by more than 154,000 votes.<\/p>\n In the recorded meeting with activists in March, Seifried said there \u201cwas a lot of disorganization, a lot of lack of preparedness and I\u2019ve heard horror story after horror story,\u201d referring to the GOP watchers barred by police due to Covid restrictions.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to have lawyers that work to build relationships with different judges so that when that happens, we\u2019re going to have lawyers that have relationships with the police chiefs in the different areas, with the police officers in the different areas so that when that happens with preexisting relationships already established so that they can\u2019t lie,\u201d Seifried said during an October 2021 training session in Oakland County.<\/p>\n A GOP-led committee found no evidence of widespread fraud<\/a> in Michigan\u2019s 2020 election and recommended the state\u2019s attorney general investigate those who made false claims “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.\u201d Numerous lawsuits were dismissed<\/a> in court.<\/p>\n In the tapes, Seifried cites specific grievances from 2020: that \u201cunsolicited\u201d absentee ballots were mailed by the Secretary of State, that not all clerks were required to match signatures on absentee ballot applications, that the number of ballot drop-off locations were dramatically increased and that Democratic areas received more outside funding to increase voting access than Republican areas.<\/p>\n In 2022 and 2024, instead of untrained volunteers, the goal is for GOP recruits to have undergone training and be equipped with new tools, according to Seifried.<\/p>\n Before sharing a slide on \u201cHow to Challenge a Voter,\u201d Seifried outlined a series of scenarios under which recruits could contest voters or voting processes, though he cautioned it is illegal to challenge every vote.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to have good reason to believe that an individual is not a citizen, that an individual is not of legal voting age. If an individual does not live at the location that they’re registered at, or if the person is not registered at all,\u201d he said during a March 2022 meeting.<\/p>\n This also includes if a voter received an absentee ballot but is voting in person. He also urged recruits to approach clerks, including attending \u201cpublic accuracy\u201d meetings to question them about how voting machines work, recording machine numbers, requesting copies of tabulator results before and after voting begins and challenging clerks to prove their machines are not connected to the internet.<\/p>\n When asked about the strategy, an RNC spokesperson initially said recruits are not being trained to challenge voters. The RNC later responded by citing a Michigan election law excerpt<\/a> that election workers \u201cshall\u201d challenge a voter if the inspector \u201cknows or has good reason to suspect\u201d the voter is ineligible and noted that a judge would ultimately review the case.<\/p>\n In an October meeting, Seifried said priority targets are Detroit, Pontiac and Southfield, which are heavily Democratic and minority areas. \u201cThose are the ones that we need to focus all our efforts on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Grassroots groups aligned with Trump are helping with recruitment. They include \u201cStand Up Michigan,\u201d whose members adapted the Village People\u2019s hit \u201cYMCA\u201d to \u201cMAGA,<\/a>\u201d Trump\u2019s \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d slogan. While the law stipulates election inspectors must be trained by local clerks, candidates are also being coached on things to look out for by operatives in RNC-sponsored workshops.<\/p>\n\u2018The precinct strategy\u2019<\/h5>\n
A focus on Michigan<\/h5>\n
\u2018How to Challenge a Voter\u2019<\/h5>\n