Many of these recruits are answering the RNC's call because they wrongly believe that fraud was committed in the 2020 election, so installing them as the supposedly unbiased officials who oversee voting at the precinct level could create chaos in such heavily Democratic precincts.
Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, an election watchdog group, said that this is the first time in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this level.
Penniman believes that lawyers and district attorneys are being created to create quick-strike networks that could be used to disrupt voting and then reject vote counts from that precinct.
The DNC trains poll watchers to help every eligible voter cast a ballot, but neither the DNC nor the state party trains poll workers. The DNC helped to recruit poll workers in 2020 due to a drop-off in older workers, but it has never trained poll workers to contest votes.
On the tapes, some of the would-be poll workers lamented that the election was fraudulent and that the Board of Canvassers was responsible for certifying the election. Republicans in Wayne County nominated a man who said he wouldn't certify the 2020 election.
Penniman and Hasen said that a domino effect could sow doubts about the election even if there was no original violation.
Hasen said that poll workers should not report what they see to political organizations.
The recordings are the first time that former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon has talked about the precinct strategy.
Penniman believes the strategy is designed to create enough disputes to justify intervention by GOP-controlled state legislatures.
Penniman said that the real hope is that you can throw the choosing of electors to state legislatures.
The participants in the recorded training sessions said their goal is to root out fraud, not just achieve more Republican poll workers.
Jacky Eubanks, a Trump-endorsed state house candidate who warned that kids his age who are communists will staff our elections, was a panelist at the election integrity summit in Detroit.
The election system is rigged, and who best to steal it is our clerks, according to Eubanks.
During the May 14 election-integrity summit, he said the party is now actively recruiting lawyers and that he wanted to start reaching out to law enforcement.
Patrick Colbeck, a former member of the Michigan state Senate and former gubernatorial candidate, said at the same summit that he is working with another organization on a kit for law enforcement.
Requests for comment were not responded to by Eubanks. Colbeck told POLITICO that there should be regular training for law enforcement on election laws.
Michigan is among a number of battleground states where party loyalists are being groomed to serve as inspectors in the next presidential election. The RNC is committing $35 million to election integrity efforts, similar to what it spent in the last cycle. He is a state director.
After it was accused of voter suppression in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the RNC was barred fromballot security measures for decades. The consent decree was allowed to expire by a federal judge.
The 2020 election would have been the first year that the RNC could have done anything with election integrity.
Republican operatives in the state of Michigan were the closest to throwing the 2020 election into a constitutional crisis. Police were called in because Covid safety protocols had been violated by so many volunteer challengers.
The poll watchers accused poll workers of blocking them from voting due to social distancing requirements. They also claimed that phony ballots were smuggled into the center to help delay certifying the state's electoral votes. Joe Biden had won the state by more than 154,000 votes.
There was a lot of disorganization, a lot of lack of preparation, and I have heard horror stories about GOP watchers being barred by police, according to a recorded meeting with activists.
We're going to have lawyers that work to build relationships with different judges so that when that happens, we're going to have lawyers that have relationships with the police chiefs in the different areas.
A GOP-led committee found no evidence of widespread fraud in Michigan's 2020 election and recommended the state's attorney general investigate those who made false claims.
Absentee ballots were mailed by the Secretary of State, not all clerks were required to match signatures, and the number of ballot drop-offs were grievances from 2020.
The goal is for GOP recruits to have undergone training and be equipped with new tools in the years to come.
It is illegal to challenge every vote, but before sharing a slide on "How to Challenge a Voter", he outlined a number of scenarios under which recruits could contest voters or voting processes.
You have to have a reason to believe that an individual is not a citizen. He said that if an individual doesn't live at the location that they're registered at, then they're not registered at all.
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