How "Poll Watchers" Enable Voter Suppression

March for Voting Rights in Midtown Manhattan on December 10, 2011. Photo by Michael Fleshman.

In early June, Pennsylvania voters lined up at the polls for the 2020 U.S. presidential primary election. In one predominantly Black Pennsylvania voting district, apprehension rose among people of color when they were forced to vote in the same building that houses the local police department. The local newspaper, PennLive, reported that law enforcement “fully suited in riot gear and armed” were ordered to watch over voting queues of citizens who had no choice but to wait in long lines, only to be turned away by the police because of the curfew.

Voter intimidation targeting marginalized communities is not a new phenomenon. In 1870, when African American men were enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment, Jim Crow laws were enacted for the express purpose of impeding the community’s new right to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes, the threat of violence, and segregated polling areas all worked to thwart Black men’s access to the polls, resulting in only three percent of eligible African Americans in the South being registered to vote in 1940. 

While these overt Jim Crow-era suppression techniques have been outlawed since 1965, more insidious tactics are employed today. According to the Brennan Center for Justice’s written testimony to the Senate in 2006, voters in Orange County, California with Latino last names were told false information about their eligibility to vote as naturalized citizens. Similarly, in 2008, Facebook users that were new voters and Florida State University students received messages inaccurately claiming that the presidential election had been postponed. Most recently in 2010, thousands of African-American households in Maryland were called while the polls were still open and were incorrectly told that Governor O’Malley had already won the election. These instances only exemplify a larger pattern of conservative campaigns to suppress minority voters.

The recent events of voter intimidation in Pennsylvania took place while the Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) was required to obtain court approval for any election day operations. In 1981, the R.N.C. was found guilty of violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 based on charges of intimidating people of color in a New Jersey gubernatorial election. During that campaign, the R.N.C. engaged in “voter caging” of predominantly Black communities, a tactic of sending non-forwardable sample ballots to voters’ registered mailing addresses. The R.N.C. then cultivated lists of voters whose sample ballots were returned undelivered, and gave the lists to poll watchers who were armed former military and off-duty policemen to use as grounds to demonstrate illegal voting, and, in some cases, even threaten so-called illegal voters with arrest.

Crowds line up for Election Day in 2008 in New York City. Photo by April Sikorski.

The Democratic National Committee (D.N.C.) sued the R.N.C. in 1981, resulting in a judicial consent decree that prevented similar suppression campaigns. However, nearly 40 years later, the decree sunsetted, and in 2018, a federal judge declined to renew it, allowing the R.N.C. to renew its voter suppression campaigns unencumbered by court supervision. According to an R.N.C. spokeswoman, the decision simply “allows the R.N.C. to play by the same rules as Democrats.” The judge, an Obama appointee who ruled in favor of the Republicans, claimed that Democrats failed to show that the R.N.C. had violated the decree. Although the R.N.C. has been found guilty of violating the consent decree several times, the most recent being in 2004, the judge was not convinced by the D.N.C.’s claims. This ruling fits into the recent trend of court decisions that side against the protection of voting rights, beginning with the gutting of essential clauses of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder. 

In light of the newly lifted restrictions, the R.N.C. and the 2020 Trump presidential campaign have announced plans to recruit 50,000 poll watchers to observe voting in 15 key states for the November election. Recruiting volunteers to monitor polls is not unusual—both parties and some political action committees regularly engage in the strategy. However, the large magnitude of the R.N.C.’s plans makes them anomalous, and they have sparked concern in the voting rights community. 

Stacey Abrams, the founder of the voting rights advocacy group Fair Fight, told MSNBC, “for the first time since 1981, the R.N.C. will be allowed to cheat and lie and go into polling places and scare voters, particularly voters of color.” The existence of a plethora of other forms of voter suppression, such as voter I.D. laws, exact-match laws, and early voting bans make it difficult to know exactly how many people have been and will be affected by these poll watchers. It is clear, however, that this renewed tactic will only serve to perpetuate and enable more suppression of minority voters. According to polls conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (P.R.R.I.) and The Atlantic, the outcomes of voter suppression strategies disproportionately affect people of color compared to white people. Nine percent of Black and Hispanic poll respondents reported that someone in their household was told in the 2018 election that they had insufficient identification, while only three percent of white respondents reported the same. Similarly, “roughly one in ten Hispanics said that the last time they or someone in their household tried to vote, they were bothered at the polls,” says Dan Cox, a P.R.R.I. researcher. Altogether, the researchers found that Black and Hispanic voters are twice as likely to experience barriers to voting as white voters, which likely played a part in the 5.7% and 17.7% voter turnout gaps between Black and Latino voters respectively compared to white voters in the 2016 election.

Polling location at Columbia Public Library in Columbia, Missouri on November 4, 2014. Photo by KOMU News.

In a roundtable discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Justin Clark, a senior political advisor to the Trump campaign, elaborated on how he and his team plan to capitalize on this new development. For years, Clark explained, the R.N.C. was “operating with one hand tied behind its back.” This time, “we will have scale,” he says, citing his plan to “leverage about 50,000 volunteers all the way through from early vote through election to be able to watch the polls.”

During the same panel, Josh Helton, another experienced R.N.C. campaign advisor, described an “E.D.O. [election day operation] program like probably no other presidential campaign has had before.” Central to the program are the poll watchers, whose “supervision,” Helton posits, could reduce 80% of the fraud that occurs when “people are left unattended and unchaperoned in some of these areas where there is no Republican presence whatsoever.” Helton does not offer any support for this claim that rests on the premise of the existence of widespread voter fraud, which has been widely recognized to be a myth. Later in the discussion, Helton claimed that the Democrats’ attempts to “get the most people bussed to the poll” creates “an artificial advantage.” If anything, this “tactic” increases voter turnout, in Helton’s own words.

The laws dictating who can be a poll watcher and what a poll watcher can do vary heavily by state. According to True the Vote, a conservative group with Tea Party roots supporting the R.N.C.'s poll watching program, poll watchers are responsible for observing election activities, documenting and reporting violations of election law, and pointing out any violations to the poll supervisor. In vote-by-mail states, poll watchers can be present at ballot counting offices. True the Vote’s website offers a poll watcher training video, although training is not usually a requirement.

Some states’ laws even support these volunteers in questioning voter legitimacy. In Michigan, a poll watcher can challenge a voter if they have “good reason” to suspect ineligibility. Michigan state law then requires the challenged voter to be removed from the queue, take an oath to defend their responses, and fill out a special ballot. This vague language allows poll watchers to decide who can and cannot vote easily. Some activists worry that the ambiguity could also work to continue the trend of minority voter suppression.

True the Vote is also starting an initiative called Continue to Serve, which calls veterans and former police officers to become poll watchers under the guidance and coordination of retired Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander Ed Hiner. In a call-to-action promotional video, Hiner reminisces about a time during his military career in 2005 in Iraq when he and “snipers across the whole city [were] protecting [Iraqi] polling booths.” 

Statements like this prompted Lauren Groh-Wargo, C.E.O. of Fair Fight, to warn that “poll watchers are a part of a ‘voter suppression war machine.’” Groh-Wargo acknowledges that such tactics will likely not result in any large scale disenfranchisement. However, she explains that “they don’t need to keep millions of people [from voting]” to change the result of the election.  In the 2016 election, as in elections of the past, winning and losing was often defined by minute portions of the population. So if the R.N.C. is able to “challenge a couple of voters here, a couple there… it all aggregates up.”

In this next presidential election, with people’s civil rights at risk and the vitality of our U.S. democracy on the line, equal, broad access to voting is paramount. The 2020 election could serve as a test of the resilience of American democracy, occurring amidst an onslaught of threats such as the global pandemic, police brutality, mass incarceration, and climate change. Central to overcoming these attacks on the livelihood and well-being of Americans is ensuring that citizens who are most affected by these adversities, primarily Black and Hispanic Americans, get a fair chance to voice their opinion at the ballot box. 

In addition to the President’s assault on vote-by-mail and the threat of the global pandemic, this large-scale election day campaign proposed by the R.N.C. could further voter suppression in November and for years to come. If state governments fail to enact protections for voters, the November election is in danger of experiencing the same ailments seen in the Pennsylvania primaries. We must act to defend the voting rights of all citizens to ensure the integrity of this coming presidential election, and set a strong precedent for future elections.

Carmen Vintro is a rising sophomore at Barnard as well as a poetry and soccer aficionado.

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