Donald Trump has spent months now mounting a brazen assault on the integrity of the November election, sowing doubt in the democratic process with unfounded claims of fraud and scheming to keep turnout low—including, it seems, by hamstringing the United States Postal Service via his handpicked postmaster general, megadonor Louis DeJoy. Now, he’s raising fears over another potential disenfranchisement tactic: armed poll watchers.
Speaking to Sean Hannity on Thursday evening, the president vowed to enlist law enforcement to monitor polling stations, apparently to root out the rampant fraud he insists will occur this fall. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys,” he said. “And we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals [sic].” As CNN pointed out, Trump doesn’t actually have the authority to mandate this, though election law expert Rick Hasen told the outlet that he could potentially hire off-duty law enforcement as poll watchers—something that would almost certainly trigger pushback from Democrats. “Trump tells Hannity that he will send law enforcement to the polls,” Democratic attorney Marc Elias said Thursday night. “Not without a legal fight he won’t!”
The GOP has a history of deploying poll watchers as an intimidation tactic, particularly in predominantly Black and brown precincts, and have already launched a massive recruitment campaign to monitor voting this November. The Republican party is working to send 50,000 people to police the polls, its first national poll-watching operation in about four decades, NBC News reported in June. While both parties make use of poll watchers, voting rights advocates are skeptical of the GOP’s operation. “They’re not going to sit idly by and ensure the lines move swiftly,” Elias told the outlet at the time. “They’re recruiting these folks so they go to the polls and either intimidate voters, or at a minimum slow the process.”
Audio obtained by the Intercept in April may hew closer to Trump and Republicans’ true motivations. At a strategy session this spring, some right-wing attendees of a strategy session for conservative donors and activists suggested deploying off-duty cops and military members to police the “inner city” and Native American areas on Election Day. “You get some [Navy] Seals in those polls and they’re going to say, ‘No, no, this is what it says. This is how we’re going to play this show,’” Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, a group that lobbies for voting restrictions and organizes volunteers to go into precincts and aggressively challenge voters who they believe are improperly registered, said at the event, per the Intercept. “That’s what we need. We need people who are unafraid to call it like they see it.”
It wasn’t clear if the plan Trump floated to Hannity Thursday night was related to the discussion at the February strategy session, which was attended by several high-profile right-wingers aligned with the GOP. But the suggestion underscores the scope of Trump and his allies’ disenfranchisement efforts in an election that the president, who’s trailing in polls, may not be able to win fair and square. Democrats have played whack-a-mole with infringements on voting rights, countering Trump’s fraud claims; pushing to expand vote-by-mail; railing against DeJoy’s cutbacks; and promising legal action against the use of law enforcement at the polls. They’ve had some success; DeJoy said this week he’d pause USPS changes until after the election. But he won’t be reversing the cuts he’s already made, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said he told her, and it seems likely that voters will have to prepare to overcome attempts at suppression. “We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can,” Michelle Obama said in a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention this week. “We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow up to make sure they’re received, and then make sure our friends and families do the same.”
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