Poll Watching is a Crucial Part of Elections — How Did It Become Controversial?
When election season kicked into high gear this summer, the Republican National Committee (RNC) laid bare its ambitious plans for when voters head to the polls: to recruit 100,000 volunteers to serve as election attorneys and poll watchers come November to ensure there “is integrity in our electoral process,” according to RNC co-chair Lara Trump.
Since then, the RNC said it’s doubled that goal. Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor for former President Donald Trump’s campaign and the RNC, recently told NBC News that, “Our unprecedented election integrity program has recruited over 200,000 volunteers to Protect the Vote — these patriots have volunteered their time to bring transparency and accountability to our election process.”
If this rhetoric sounds like déjà vu — it is. In the months before the 2020 presidential election, the RNC and Trump campaign recruited tens of thousands of poll watchers to monitor voting throughout the country. The RNC explained the massive poll watcher recruitment effort — in 2020 and 2024 — is because of mass voter fraud and allegations that Democrats were scheming to steal the election away from the former president. These claims have been proven false. And just as it did in 2020, the RNC funded poll watching trainings throughout the country — dubbed the “Protect the Vote Tour” — to train volunteers for what to look out for at the polls.
Before 2020, this effort wouldn’t necessarily register as anything other than routine to voting rights experts and advocates. Poll watching is a longstanding, crucial but otherwise routine part of U.S. elections. Political parties recruit volunteers for every polling place to observe the process and make sure that voting and ballot counting happens as it’s legally supposed to.
“Poll watching is probably 100 years old. It’s not a new process,” Wendy Underhill, director of elections and redistricting at the National Conference of State Legislatures, told Democracy Docket. “It’s boring to be a poll watcher. It’s best to bring a book along.”
But the recent rise of disinformation and dangerous election-related conspiracy theories have fundamentally transformed otherwise mundane, routine election processes into controversial partisan battlegrounds. Much like how right-wing groups and figures weaponized election certification in attempts to overturn the election results, the RNC and other groups are now training armies of poll watchers to sniff out election fraud that doesn’t exist — and, in the process, potentially intimidate voters.
A brief history of partisan poll watching
Poll watchers are individuals — usually volunteers — who aren’t election workers but are allowed to be at polling places and ballot counting centers to monitor the election process. Each state has different rules for poll watchers — who can be one, how they’re appointed, how many are allowed in each ballot counting site. But in general, the role of poll watchers is essentially the same in every state: they closely watch voting at polling places and then observe election officials as they take the necessary, legal steps to count ballots in an election.
And that’s all — poll watchers are prohibited from interfering in any way in the electoral process and, should they notice something out of the ordinary, their only recourse is to report it to party officials and polling place authorities.
Sometimes poll watchers are trained by nonpartisan election officials and other times poll watchers are trained by political parties, who then send those partisan poll watchers as representatives of the party. “Election officials do try hard to work with their local parties to ensure that the rules are understood by the parties,” Underhill said. “And many election officials will offer training for poll watchers… making sure that they are, of course, following the actual laws in every state, and also that they know what to look for and understand that they’re there to observe, but not to play a role in the elections.”
So for the RNC to train poll watchers, historically, is not just routine but an expected and important part of elections. “The fact that poll watchers are appointed by partisan sources is not a bad thing,” Andrew Garber, a counsel within the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, told Democracy Docket. “Candidates and parties have a lot of stake in elections, and everyone benefits if they can have eyes and ears on the ground to provide transparency to make sure the rules are being followed, just an extra set of eyes in case any issues come up.”
How poll watching became controversial
Problems with partisan poll watchers is a relatively new phenomenon. One that, in modern times, derived in the months before the 2020 election, when Trump and his sycophants began spreading disinformation about the election. As conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, mail-in ballots and illegal votes cast by deceased people spread like wildfire before and during the election, it inspired some poll watchers to break the rules and engage in intimidating behavior in a misguided attempt to protect the integrity of elections.
In the 2020 election, for example, a poll watcher in Texas accused a voter of not looking like a U.S. citizen and demanded to see their identification. In the 2022 election, also in Texas, an armed poll watcher, followed election officials into a ballot-counting location. And in 2022, during the early voting period in Pima County, Arizona, TIME reported that election staff “reported feelings of intimidation, harassment, and general uncomfortableness by these individuals,” according to a report by the Pima County Recorder’s Office.
“The problems we’re seeing with poll watchers are sometimes derived from these partisan interests,” Garber said. “We’re seeing more and more that poll watchers think that they’re on a partisan mission that justifies rule breaking, or they are motivated by disinformation that has become pervasive in our elections and they want to stir up trouble.”
Even in instances where partisan poll watchers are following the rules, Garber is worried about how groups like the RNC are training poll watchers. If they’re training them to spread disinformation and look for election fraud that doesn’t exist, it’s going to slow down the voting process — whether it’s for people in line to vote or while counting ballots.
He cites the dozens of lawsuits in the aftermath of the 2020 election that relied on faulty claims from partisan poll watchers. “But when these claims got to court, they crumbled. They fell to pieces. It was very often obvious there was no real evidence they were based on misunderstandings by the poll watchers, or, in some cases, outright lies, Garber said.
When watching turns to intimidation
It’s not the first time that the RNC has gotten into trouble over its election integrity efforts. In 1981, during a New Jersey gubernatorial race, the RNC was behind a stunt to hang up posters in Black and Latino neighborhoods warning that, “This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force. It is a crime to falsify a ballot.” RNC strategists even convened armed off-duty police officers and private security guards to patrol voting precincts.
The RNC was sued for its voter intimidation stunt, which was settled out of court. Under the settlement, the RNC agreed to a consent decree that the GOP would abstain from poll watching, unless a court allowed it. The RNC refrained from training poll watchers until 2018, when the consent decree was lifted — and the RNC could train poll watchers for the 2020 election.
Though the RNC didn’t resort to egregious and blatant voter intimidation tactics like it did in 1981, there’s still a fear that its poll watcher training efforts could lead to more voter intimidation.
It’s the spread of disinformation and conspiracies that lead voting rights advocates and election experts to worry about how partisan poll watchers might intimidate voters or try to interfere with the elections process. Garber cites examples — like the incidents in Arizona and Texas — of partisan poll watchers in 2020 and 2022 doing things like stalking voters or election workers at polling places, aggressively confronting voters asking to see their voter registration and accusing election officials of cheating as examples of poll watchers not following the rules.
In one instance, in Colorado in 2020, there were reports of two armed men in military fatigues filming a ballot drop box. While they weren’t official poll watchers, numerous voters reported that they felt intimidated by their presence. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) cites the incident as an example of how the far-right is radicalizing citizens to take election integrity matters into their own hands — whether it’s through official channels of poll watching or otherwise.
Poll watching training is “part of the far right’s effort to actually just scare voters,” Griswold told Democracy Docket. “The far right is trying to scare people from being an election worker, being a secretary of state, being a voter, serving on a jury, being a judge. They’re trying to scare people out of civic life and engagement, and we can’t allow them to do that.”