US election experts worry about Republican poll watchers in swing states
Originally published by Helen Coster, Alexandra Ulmer, and Tim Reid for Reuters
“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.