GOP Activists: Thousands of Poll Watchers May Be Deployed for 2022 Midterms

Observers watch a poll worker tabulate ballots at the Allegheny County Election Warehouse after the election in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. Nov. 6, 2020. Reuters/John Altdorfer

Thousands of volunteers in midterm battleground states have been trained on local election procedures and to become poll watchers, a conservative group has confirmed.

Volunteers have been trained to clean voter rolls, understand changes to election procedures, and become poll watchers or even election judges, Jenny Beth Martin, the chair of Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA), told The Washington Times.

“The first part is about personal relationships, and the second is about procedures and policies,” Martin told the paper. “Do they use temporary staffing companies [to manage elections]? What computer systems are they using? What contracts do they have in place for that?”

Martin and another trainer, Toni Shuppe, the head of Audit the Vote PA, said that about 6,000 people are in training to become poll watchers in Pennsylvania alone ahead of the midterms, a massive increase from the 500 in 2020, Shuppe said.

Shuppe also recently confirmed to Reuters that her group is “focused on encouraging people to become poll watchers in the upcoming November midterm elections.” The Republican National Committee (RNC) told The Washington Post last week that it and its allies have staged thousands of training sessions on how to become a poll watcher and how to lodge election-related complaints.

Andrea Raffle, the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) director for election integrity in Pennsylvania, told participants on the call that they had already filled 6,000 poll watcher positions in the state this year, compared with 1,000 in 2020. Raffle referred a request for comment to the RNC’s national office.

The RNC has been pouring resources into recruiting observers and workers since being freed from the restrictions of a court-ordered consent decree in 2018, according to Reuters. It expects to have trained over 52,000 poll watchers and workers between November last year and the coming election; it said comparative numbers for past elections were unavailable.

“The more eyes that we have on this election, the more comfortable people will be that the outcome was fair and transparent,” Shuppe said, adding to the outlet that such efforts are necessary to ensure transparency so as to not repeat problems that unfolded in 2020.

Some Republican observers said they were unlawfully kicked out of polling places in Detroit, Philadelphia, and other Democrat-majority areas during the 2020 election amid allegations of voter fraud.

“The endgame is to have Democrats and Republicans alike have as many eyes on [the election] as possible so that both parties are comfortable in the outcome at the end of the day,” said Shuppe, who endorsed GOP Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. “We just don’t want a repeat of 2020, where people are running around screaming ‘fraud.’ That, to me, would be the worst possible outcome.”

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee told Reuters that the group doesn’t have a national number because state party offices manage their poll watcher recruitment.

RNC and Democratic National Committee officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Reuters contributed to this report.