Steve Bannon leaves a New York federal court in August 2020. MARK KAUZLARICH/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Embracing the “precinct strategy” promoted by Steve Bannon, the GOP is reportedly preparing to sow chaos in the 2022 election by creating an “army” of poll workers and Republican lawyers to challenge voters in Democratic precincts. According to recordings obtained by Politico, the Republican National Committee has been recruiting and training poll watchers to contest votes and building a network of party-friendly attorneys to help them. The operation has been cast by Republican officials as an effort to even out party imbalances among poll workers in urban centers like Detroit. But its true aims seem clear: to gum up the democratic process in Democratic areas and lay the foundation for results to be challenged in swing states like Michigan that were key to Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
“Come election day you create massive failure of certification,” Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of the election watchdog group Issue One, told Politico. “The real hope is that you can throw the choosing of electors to state legislators.”
The undertaking illustrates the extent to which the GOP is institutionalizing Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies—and provides a glimpse into the party’s efforts to hijack the infrastructure of the election system. “This 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,” Penniman said. “It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.”
In the wake of the 2020 election, Trump and his allies mounted a relentless effort to contest the results in several states he lost. Under the new operation, the party could essentially do that in real time, with trained poll watchers—many of whom appear to have volunteered for positions because they subscribe to Trump’s “rigged election” lies—in direct contact with GOP lawyers who “could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts,” Politico reported. “Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, said in a November meeting with state GOP activists, according to a recording obtained by the outlet.
“It’s going to be an army,” Seifried said at a different meeting last fall. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”
Seifried referred Politico’s request to the RNC, which defended its plans. “Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,” RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick told Politico. “The 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.”
The plan is essentially the “precinct strategy” that was developed a decade ago by Arizona lawyer Dan Schultz and championed more recently by Bannon, the former Trump strategist: “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won,” Bannon said on a podcast episode last year. “We’re going to take this back village by village…precinct by precinct.”
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As ProPublica has reported, Bannon’s promotion of that bottom-up technique has contributed to a groundswell of Large Lie proponents in search of roles within the election course of, together with as precinct officers and ballot employees. Trump himself gave his blessing to the plan this yr, approvingly citing Schultz—who has ties to the Oath Keepers, a far-right group that took half within the January 6 rebellion—in an e-mail to supporters in March. “Simply heard about an unimaginable effort underway that may strengthen the Republican Get together,” Trump stated, in response to ProPublica. “If members of our Nice motion begin getting concerned (meaning YOU changing into a precinct committeeman on your voting precinct), we will take again our nice Nation from the bottom up.”
It goes with out saying that enlisting election deniers to exert affect over the voting course of poses a significant menace to the democratic system. However it’s only one such menace: From anti-voting laws enacted on the idea of Trump’s lies to a gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano who has indicated he wouldn’t respect election outcomes, Republicans are constructing on the previous president’s 2020 efforts to overturn his loss. The democratic course of survived that stress take a look at a yr and a half in the past. The one it is going to face within the coming elections, as that anti-democratic push grows extra subtle, might be even more durable.
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