By Tiffany Hsu from the New York Times.
Groups are preparing thousands of observers for midterm elections in November. Some volunteers are being conditioned to expect bad behavior.
Election observation is supposed to be boring, a routine way to confirm that voting is proceeding properly. The task is sometimes likened to waiting in a field for an alien landing.
For years, political parties, congressional committees, think tanks and nonpartisan civic groups have trained volunteers as election observers to witness, document and occasionally challenge the democratic process.
But as the November midterm elections approach, poll watching has become increasingly high stakes. While many of the trainings are neutral and informative, some are seeding distrust, priming participants with misinformed expectations for bad behavior, according to a review by The New York Times of dozens of training sessions and hundreds of instructional slides.
One Republican-backed training claimed that elections carried “an incentive for fraud.” An anti-Trump group created an election-monitoring tool kit titled “Hands Off Our Vote.” Other sessions advised on ways to counter “disinformation and scare tactics,” imagined reacting to intimidation by immigration agents and suggested that poll watchers surveil other poll watchers.
Long lines, machine hiccups and registration snarls are not unheard-of on Election Day, and other problems could also arise. But generally, voting tends to be uneventful, and even the tense tenor of the poll watching trainings is unlikely to cause much trouble in the moment. However, their tone could lead to a deeper, longer-term erosion of faith in a system already under attack.
“If you tell people thousands of times that there’s going to be wrongdoing — and someone sees a little bit of something that looks a little like what they’ve been primed to see as wrongdoing but that is actually not in any way illegal — that absolutely can contribute to the broader misinformation,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who worked at the White House and Justice Department under Democratic administrations.
American elections have been steeped in suspicion for at least a decade, as President Trump and others have promoted the myth of widespread voter fraud. After the fractious 2020 election, lawmakers in multiple states introduced dozens of bills to expand the powers of poll watchers.
This year, with control of Congress in play, the Department of Justice said it planned to dispatch “a historic” number of poll monitors around the country, including an estimated 1,000 volunteers in November. The Association of State Democratic Committees said on Monday that it planned to train at least 10,000 volunteers as “democracy protectors” — essentially poll watchers — to counter intimidation from immigration agents and other federal agents.
Election observers are distinct from poll workers, who run the elections. They can be positioned at voting locations, canvassing sites or central counting facilities and are defined and governed by rules that vary across more than 10,000 jurisdictions nationwide.
In recent months, trainings for those volunteers have been held in small-town cafes, city churches, suburban office parks and virtual webinars. Most of those reviewed by The Times were factual and instructive, but some framed poll watching as a form of policing rather than passive observation — as if catching misconduct was the priority and not a rarity.
Several Republican-aligned groups framed poll watching as a way to root out mismanagement or deception. A training manual from the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, told potential volunteers that they were “a protective measure” against error and fraud. In Michigan, where a Senate race is being hotly contested, one Republican candidate said on the radio that recruiting retired police officers and others as observers could make it “harder to cheat.”
A livestreamed training last month for Republican poll watchers in Michigan told volunteers that they were “part of this critical mission to ensure Republicans win.” The online session covered the possibility that a voter might cheat with an absentee ballot and instructed volunteers to “keep your eyes peeled” for those refusing to provide identification.
“We want our people overseeing these elections,” the trainer said. “For a long time, we’ve had Democrats that have run all these elections and it’s turned into a nightmare, so it’s time that we take them back.”
Some Democratic-aligned groups presented poll monitors as a defense against attempts to restrict voter access. In July, progressive community organizers gathered hundreds of people for two “constitutional observer” trainings in Arizona — one at a flower-festooned event space usually occupied by weddings and quinceañeras.
Using a 44-page slide deck, presenters laid out a theoretical situation in which the National Guard was deployed to polling locations in Phoenix and Tucson, accompanied by immigration agents, according to the organizers. The volunteers were responsible, organizers said, for “standing against intimidation, misinformation and voter suppression.”
In Ventura County, Calif., the local chapter of the League of Women Voters held an online election observation session late last year. A trainer told volunteers to “keep in mind that other groups who are out there observing may have different motives as to why they’re observing.”
“One thing we might want to do is keep an eye out and see what the observers are also doing,” the trainer added.
In recent elections, some poll watchers have turned vigilante, often incensed by unsubstantiated conspiracy theories on the right about extensive noncitizen voting, foreign manipulation and cheating via mail-in ballots. Partisan election monitors have stalked election officials and harassed voters, demanding to see identification, filming videos and openly carrying firearms.
Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, a Republican, pushed back last month against what he called “aggressive, unexpected, disruptive” behavior by two election monitors from the Justice Department. He said they had tried to interview voters and examine voting machines.
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Gov. Mark Gordon objected to actions by Justice Department election monitors in Montana last month.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Mostly, poll watcher trainings have urged restraint, cautioning volunteers not to interfere with the voting process. The New York State Democratic Party said its training this year covered “de-escalation and conflict avoidance.”
A slide deck prepared last year for the Fairfax Republicans in Virginia warned, “No Rambo behavior!” The group encouraged volunteers to “walk in with the assumption that you are going to observe a well-run operation.”
Often, voting experts said, Americans assume that poll observation is a partisan exercise, though there are efforts to make the activity more unbiased. Frances Moore Lappé, a notable 82-year-old researcher of food policy and democracy, put out a playful video on social media last month in which she appealed for Generation Z to volunteer as nonpartisan poll monitors, calling the role “a kind of vibe” and “such a slay.”
“Democracy-maxxing,” she said.
The Nevada Election Observation Network, or NEON, is another nonpartisan program. The initiative, which focuses on collecting comprehensive statewide data about the election process, is funded by the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that has observed elections around the world since 1989.
The center, which is also propping up nonpartisan election-observation initiatives in its native Georgia as well as in Michigan, Montana and New Mexico, convened several dozen community organizers in Reno late last month to teach them to recruit and educate election observers.
They met in an airy modern-industrial Unitarian church with L.G.B.T.Q. insignia on the walls, conchas sweet bread on a tablecloth and pamphlets about the nearby Hawk Fire, which had threatened to derail the training. Topics included accessibility issues for voters and how to navigate mail-in ballot procedures kept in flux by a legal fight with the Trump administration.
Attendees introduced themselves as a burned-out social worker, a recovering politician, a former history teacher concerned about democratic decline and representatives from rural areas and tribal reservations. One woman said she was certain that people would be caught attempting fraud at the polls. Another woman, from Las Vegas, said that “it’s good for people to police each other, make sure everyone’s doing the right thing.”
Political silos and sensationalist rumors around elections risk causing voters to think that isolated problems at one site represent deeper rot on a larger scale, said Sarah Cooper, the Carter Center’s senior associate director for democracy, who flew into Nevada from Washington, D.C., for the training.
“Most Americans really care deeply about our elections,” she said. “We are not here to represent any particular outcome, any particular party, any particular candidate — we just want to make sure that the elections are well run.”
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