According to reports in The New York Times, Republican groups are training GOP activists to be election workers.
The recordings of several meetings and training sessions were obtained by Politico.
Matthew Seirfried, who leads the Republican National Committee's election integrity efforts in Michigan, said in one recording that being a poll worker gives you many more rights and things you can do to stop something.
Poll watchers are recruited and trained by both political parties to observe the voting process at the polls on Election Day in case of a close election or recount.
Volunteer election workers from both parties are required in many states.
Republicans say their election integrity investments are to keep up with Democrats.
Gates McGavick, a spokesman for the RNC, said that Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years and that they are terrified of an even playing field.
The plans by Republican activists to recruit election workers in charge of running the election process and be in close contact with local law enforcement would mark a new frontier in election administration and possibly engender more partisan interference in the voting process.
Nick Penniman, CEO of campaign finance and democracy group Issue One, said that this is the first time in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this level to put a network together.
One aim of the Michigan efforts is to create a direct line between Republican election workers and party lawyers, according to a recording obtained by Politico.
In one October, he said that they were going to have more lawyers than they had ever recruited.
The Amistad Project is trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network according to a recording obtained by the outlet.
The local district attorney is more powerful than the congressman, according to the recording. They can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure records are retained, and so on.
In audio of another meeting in March, he said that they were going to have lawyers that worked to build relationships with different judges and police chiefs.
State and local election officials have already faced mounting levels of harassment and threats as a result of President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn his election loss.
The early test of whether trained partisan election workers will make an impact in the primaries will be in Michigan and Arizona.
In 2020, the Trump campaign boasted of assembling a sophisticated poll watching option that largely failed to materialized across the country, although Republican election observers got into clashes with officials at vote-counting centers in big cities like Philadelphia and Detroit.
The Trump campaign lost over 50 lawsuits, including ones that relied on affidavits from partisan poll watchers, seeking to halt the counting of votes, the disqualification of ballots, and blocking the certification of election results.
In a worst-case scenario, election workers could cause chaos or raise spurious allegations of fraud at polling places in the hopes of throwing the election into the hands of partisan officials.
Penniman argued that the real hope was that the electors could be thrown to state legislatures.
The Election Integrity Network is led by a Republican lawyer, and they are trying to recruit and train a volunteer army of citizens, The Times reported on Monday.
Mitchell introduced Trump to John Eastman, a conservative legal scholar. She was present on the January 2 phone call where Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes and spoke to Trump at least once on the day of the insurrection.
Mitchell trains activists to work on the inside as poll workers, serve as election observers, and file public records requests to determine whether officials are, according to The Times.
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