Grassroots Election Integrity Efforts Go Full Scale for Midterms

A voter casts her ballot with her child at a polling station at Rose Hill Elementary School during the midterm primary election in Alexandria, Va., on June 21, 2022. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Grassroots election integrity efforts have risen to a new level for this year’s midterms.

With more than 4,500 poll watchers and election workers trained, the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election integrity pilot program was a success, according to the Virginia Fair Election Coalition (VFE), a consortium of more than 20 mostly conservative nonprofits.

Similar efforts are occurring in more states, with more volunteers contributing their time and unique expertise. All are laboring with the same goal in mind: a fair and transparent election.

“Across the country, people are waking up to how they can work as citizens to restore faith in the outcome of our elections,” Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chairwoman of Tea Party Patriots Action (TPP Action), a conservative grassroots advocacy group with about 3 million members nationwide, told The Epoch Times.

Following the template created by VFE in 2021, TPP Action has trained more than 7,500 people on election integrity in multiple states, according to Martin. The group held state tours in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to offer election-related training sessions, including poll watching in urban and rural areas.

Based in Georgia, TPP Action also partnered with fair election coalitions in many states and participated in election integrity summits in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

The table below contains an incomplete tally of the coalitions’ work results.

“Volunteers are not just complaining about a problem but are taking the time to learn how to solve problems and then taking action based on that training,” Martin added.

‘It Impacts Everything’

Elizabeth in Texas’s Travis County, which covers Austin, is one such volunteer.

She had heard of election irregularities before the 2020 election but didn’t seriously look into those issues until after Nov. 3, 2020, when everyday citizens raised concerns about the vote and how it was handled and provided witness accounts. Through this process, she got to know other Texans who shared these worries.

Now, Elizabeth—who didn’t want her last name disclosed, fearing for her privacy and safety—is an overall coordinator of the “Texas team,” an election integrity task force consisting of 70 members, with between two and four representatives per county in 31 Texas counties. That’s about 12 percent of the 254 counties in the state.

She is focusing on current and future elections because “people cannot talk about [the] 2020 [election] with any objectivity,” she told The Epoch Times.

Her team is decentralized and doesn’t have an official name yet, she said. Different subgroups focus on different initiatives, including recruiting and training poll watchers, door-to-door canvassing to validate voter roll data, filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and persuading counties to stop using voting machines.

Elizabeth left her management consultant job in 2014 so that she could spend more time with her son, now 16. But since 2021, she has devoted herself to election integrity efforts.

“If we don’t have secure, well-run elections, then there’s nothing else that works properly in the country,” she said. “It impacts everything—this will impact my child’s life.”

A man casts his vote during the early voting period for the midterms at the Fairfax County Government Center in Fairfax, Va., on Oct. 7, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

She added that if Americans couldn’t be certain about election security and the accuracy of the results, “then I don’t know where this country will go.” So she felt compelled to contribute her project management skills to the drive to secure the country’s elections.

While election integrity has become a hot-button and highly partisan issue since the 2020 election, this shouldn’t be the case, Elizabeth believes. Both sides should feel a sense of urgency.

“When are we going to look at it if Republicans don’t want to look at it when the Republicans win, and Democrats don’t want to look at it when the Democrats win?” she said.

Elizabeth became a registered Republican after the 2020 election.

“The left has left me,” she said, adding that the ideas of the left have become “extreme.”

In addition, as a moderate, Elizabeth was turned off by fellow liberals’ unfiltered comments about conservatives. “The mean and hateful things said about the conservative side are tragic and disturbing.”

To Elizabeth, the “general gaslighting” was the most challenging part of her efforts in advocating for more secure elections.

“What’s frustrating is that it feels like the press and the political parties are manipulating some kind of hatred of Trump to keep people from talking about the real issues,” she said.

Public Support

But the most rewarding part of Elizabeth’s endeavor was to know that many more people cared about the issue. From October 2021 to January 2022, the Texas team, using publicly available voter roll data, canvassed voters of the 2000 election in five counties: Bell, Bexar, Williamson, Hays, and Travis.

When door-knocking in these counties, volunteers asked questions to verify the voter’s address and whether the voter voted using the same method as recorded: absentee, mail-in, or in-person. The goal was to help with voter data clean-up, she said.

Elizabeth door-knocked in her home county, Travis, and other counties.

“Everywhere I go and everyone I talk to, they’re concerned,” she said.

“They don’t know what to do, and they want to do something. They want to be involved, and someone to tell them what to do.”

The team knocked on more than 8,000 doors and spoke with more than 5,000 people. Elizabeth estimated the responses to the canvassing were: 95 percent positive, 4 percent neutral, and 1 percent negative.

In her home county of Travis, one of the most consistently Democratic counties in the state, the team knocked on more than 2,000 doors and spoke with 1,000 people. They recorded only two negative encounters involving people who were angry about the canvassing.

In Travis County, the team found about 5 percent of voters reported a different voting method for the 2020 election than that specified in county records. But Elizabeth noted that they would need additional data to verify voting method discrepancies. In addition, 3 percent of the canvassed voters didn’t live at the recorded addresses during the 2020 election, according to Elizabeth.

Six months ago, the team started providing feedback on data discrepancies to counties. In the past three months, some of the counties made some of their suggested updates to their voter rolls.

A map showing local congressional district changes outside the Fairfax County Government Center, an early voting site, in Fairfax, Va., on Oct. 7, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

Efforts Ramp Up

Lynn Taylor, VFE chair and president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, a nonprofit education and research organization, said grassroots organizers who worked through the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election didn’t disappear and take the institutional knowledge with them, as what would typically happen after an election season.

“Not only were they still there, but they are all still working, still increasing the numbers of people out there, the citizens who are working on election integrity,” shetol d The Epoch Times. “It’s been phenomenal. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s absolutely wonderful.”

During the Virginia pilot in 2021, VFE organized training for poll watchers, weekly meetings during the early voting period, and for state and federal-level experts to be available on election day to answer questions for volunteers.

This year, VFE has continued the practice. It has election integrity task forces in more than 60 counties in Virginia, according to Taylor. In addition, it has organized “train the trainer” events to deepen the bench of poll watcher trainers. This program has resulted in between 20 and 25 trainers being trained in Fairfax County—the state’s most populous county with more than a million people—alone this year.

Frank Lusby, a coordinator for the Arlington County GOP election integrity working group and an executive of a local nonprofit working to reduce poverty through private sector development, attended a VFE election integrity summit in July 2021, and discovered that no one was leading the effort in Arlington County for the Republican Party. He then volunteered to do it.

“My primary interest was to learn more about election integrity and to contribute as best as possible to ensure that we have good transparent elections in Virginia and starting in our locality here,” Lusby told The Epoch Times. “Easy to vote, hard to cheat.”

This year, his working group has more volunteers. That means Lusby has been able to supply poll watchers for all early voting days in the county, unlike during the 2021 election, he said.

In addition to poll watching, they have also expanded to other areas, including crosschecking undeliverable election mail returned to the local election office with voter rolls to ensure the roll is up-to-date, observing the processing of mail-in ballots at the Central Absentee Precinct where all absentee ballots in the county are processed, observing the testing of voting machines (also called logic and accuracy testing) at the county election office, attending electoral board meetings, and visiting nursing homes to educate voters potentially vulnerable to ballot harvesting.

Inside an early voting room in the Fairfax County Government Center, an early voting site, in Fairfax, Va., on Oct. 7, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

Poll Watching Goes Digital

Jonathan Lareau, a data scientist at a defense contractor in northern Virginia, started looking at election data the day after the 2020 elections.

“The idea was that, by looking at these numbers, I would be able to show that everything was fine,” he told The Epoch Times.

But he ended up discovering that he couldn’t even do the analysis due to “problematic” and “subpar” data.

“There’s no way to validate our elections,” Lareau said. “We’ve got to fix that [election data] first before we ever have a prayer of actually figuring out whether or not an election was legitimate.”

For example, he tried to purchase the state’s registered voter list as of 2020. The Virginia Department of Elections told him that he couldn’t do that; only a current list was available.

In an analysis (pdf) of 2020 election results data in the state that Lareau completed in October 2021, he found that a comparison of precinct-level data and the summary data on the Virginia Department of Elections (ELECT) website showed a difference of 144,463 absentee votes.

He further found that the published 2020 voter turnout ratio, which is the number of votes cast versus the number of registered voters in Virginia, could point to potentially more than 382,000 votes being accounted for incorrectly. ELECT initially reported an 81.48 percent turnout ratio that didn’t agree with the 4.5 million votes out of the total 6 million registered voters. If the number of votes was correct, the turnout ratio should have been 75 percent. However, if the turnout ratio was correct and the number of votes was wrong, that could mean 382,000 votes were missing.

Lareau said that the turnout ratio on the current website was updated to 75 percent in September 2021 without a public statement explaining the change. The Virginia Department of Elections also didn’t return his inquiries seeking an explanation. The Epoch Times sought comment from the department about this issue, but didn’t receive a response.

A registered Republican, Lareau self-identifies as a classical liberal, and is more aligned with conservative values while not religious. He said he had voted in Democrat primaries in 2016, but after that in Republican primaries.

The more he reviewed Virginia’s election data, the more problems he saw and the more committed he was to fixing them. About six months ago, he founded a nonprofit called the Electoral Process Education Corp. The organization developed a platform to process information collected by poll watchers to help with monitoring efforts. It also acquires from ELECT election data that usually aren’t available to the public to conduct analysis.

So far, Lareau has invested about $20,000 of his own money this year into the nonprofit, and probably needs to spend another $15,000 to purchase datasets such as voter history and registered voters lists.

Early voting for the midterms started in Virginia on Sept. 23. An early voting sign outside the Fairfax County Government Center in Fairfax, Va., on Oct. 7, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

On his poll watcher reporting platform, poll watchers can record incidents such as voter intimidation, denial of entry, and prohibition from observation. Such incident reports are instantly flagged for the poll watcher’s team lead. In addition, specific incidents would go immediately to the Republican Party of Virginia’s legal hotline, Lareau said.

Lareau’s online report also collects counts on a poll pad, an electronic tablet that logs voter check-ins, at the opening and closing of shifts. These figures are provided by poll watchers who are allowed to observe the total counts. If the count at the start of a shift doesn’t match the previous day’s closing count, his program flags an error for further investigation by the poll-watching team lead.

Since Virginia’s early voting began on Sept. 23, his platform has collected more than 100 reports from 14 poll stations in seven counties and one independent city as of Oct. 4. That’s eight localities out of Virginia’s total of 133 total.

As of Oct. 12, more than half of the poll-watching records were clear without incidents logged. About a fifth of the records contained reported incidents.

Lareau said election integrity teams in California and Texas were also considering using his platform. According to Elizabeth, six to 10 counties on the Texas team are interested. Early voting got underway on Oct. 10 in California and will begin on Oct. 24 in Texas.

In Lareau’s view, poll watchers and digital poll watchers should be a part of a political candidate’s campaign operation.

Because at the end of the day, there is a lot at stake.

“Our elections are the most important thing that we have,“ he said. ”If our elections aren’t transparent and aren’t secure, then there is no foundation for a general republic. Plain and simple.”