Pro-voting group prepares hundreds of volunteers to monitor Texas voting

With Texans facing more than their share of potential hurdles in this year’s midterm elections, pro-voting groups are hard at work preparing to back them up at the polls.

Along with its typical voting challenges, the Lone Star State is also contending with a major statewide voter registration snafu, a GOP plan that slashed Tarrant County’s Election Day voting locations and a new top election official after the Texas Secretary of State was unceremoniously swapped out this summer for unknown reasons. 

And with President Donald Trump’s administration continuing to sow doubts about elections across the country, it comes as little surprise that Marliza Marin, Common Cause’s Texas program manager, said Wednesday the organization is training more election protection volunteers than ever before.

“We have actually already hit the ground running. We have over 400 volunteers already trained,” Marin said, adding that that level of activation is “unheard of” at this point, with a couple of weeks left to bring in more volunteers before Texas in-person early voting begins Oct. 19.

Common Cause is a major partner in the non-partisan coalition that operates the Election Protection Hotline — a vital resource that voters across the country call to get assistance and report local problems.

The group also stations trained poll monitor volunteers outside of voting locations in Texas, where they’re able to help respond to any voting issues in person. 

The Trump administration is staffing up its own army of election monitors to observe polls across the country this year as well. The GOP also launched a pilot program that trains observers to identify possible discrepancies with voting machines.

Pro-voting groups are readying their own observers. Andrew Walchuk, Common Cause’s senior policy director and counsel for voting and fair representation, said the organization has prepared for the midterms by training “thousands” of volunteers nationwide, representing the largest on-the-ground presence of non-partisan election protection observers.

And they’re not done adding more trained volunteers to help protect this year’s elections. 

“We expect that to grow considerably over the coming weeks,” Walchuk said.