“Be aggressive,” Jim Womack, a local Republican Party chair in North Carolina, told the grid of faces who joined the Zoom training session for volunteers to monitor voting on Nov. 5. “The more assertive and aggressive you are in watching and reporting, the
better the quality of the election.”
During the two-hour session, conducted from a Republican Party office featuring a placard of an AR-15 rifle and photos of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Womack, 69, an army veteran and a retired information systems engineer, instructed 40 volunteers on how to spot “nefarious activity.”
He mentioned a local clergyman who accompanied dozens of Latino parishioners to a voting site “like a shepherd leading a sheep.”
Voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States – despite Trump’s false claim, supported by a majority of Republicans in Congress, that the 2020 election was stolen.
U.S. election security officials have said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”
A months-long analysis by the Associated Press found fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud in the six battleground states challenged by Trump.
With less than two weeks to go until the Nov. 5 election, officials in Lee County in the battleground state of North Carolina told Reuters they are concerned that training sessions like Womack’s, with its call for aggressive scrutiny of the voting process, could lead to disruptions at the polls. The Lee County officials say they are adopting new safeguards to prevent poll workers from feeling intimidated.
Reuters observed an Oct. 16 NCEIT training session and obtained previously unreported transcripts of NCEIT planning calls, which raised the prospect of noncitizen voting.
Reuters also spoke to 10 election officials, former election officials and voter rights advocates who expressed concerns that some poll watchers could disrupt, delay and undermine confidence in the election, and potentially lay the groundwork to overturn
the result if Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris wins.
“The playbook seems to be to cast doubt, sow chaos at every possible opportunity, so that if you lose you then have laid the foundation in the minds of your followers and supporters to justify additional action,” said Tammy Patrick, a former election official who now works at the National Association of Election Administrators, a nonpartisan group of state election directors.
How To Spot An ‘Illegal’
Poll watchers, who monitor the casting and counting of ballots at polling stations, have been a feature of the American electoral system for decades.
The Democratic Party plans to field its own observers at polling places, including those in Lee County. The Democratic National Committee and the Harris campaign said they are
mobilizing thousands of volunteers in voter protection teams across key states, but declined to give further details.
Despite its extreme rarity, Trump and his fellow Republicans have made allegations of noncitizen voting a key part of preparations for legal challenges if Trump loses on November 5.
“Non citizen Illegal Migrants are getting the right to vote, being pushed by crooked Democrat Politicians,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in July.
NCEIT addressed noncitizen voting in two planning calls, according to the transcripts obtained by Reuters. In July, a participant raised the subject of how to spot an “illegal” and suggested that a person who can’t speak English probably doesn’t have the right to vote.
One participant in an NCEIT planning call in May said she makes signs for polling locations in different languages, including in “African,” stating only U.S. citizens can vote. She
called her signs “psyop,” shorthand for psychological operations aimed at influencing people’s behavior.
Womack said that he doesn’t recall that conversation and does not agree with the assertion. “These live calls are conversations and we get lots of inquiries,” he said. He added that NCEIT strives to educate and train participants in accordance with the law, and sometimes has to correct invalid statements and assertions on the calls.
But he said that NCEIT’s “antenna are up about the influx of Hispanics, and they’re accidentally being registered to vote.”
Patrick Gannon, public information director for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said there was no evidence of noncitizens trying to affect the election in any way.
NCEIT would challenge any voter it believed was ineligible, Womack said. He also told trainees to be polite and said that NCEIT does not “condone voter suppression or intimidation of any kind.”
Some voter rights advocates said the training could lead to unfair targeting of Black or Latino voters.
“We’re concerned that rhetoric about noncitizens voting will be used to say there was some sort of irregularity and try to prevent the election results from being certified,” said Katelin Kaiser, policy director at watchdog group Democracy North Carolina.
With Reuters inputs
