The Virginia governor’s race, a dead heat between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin, is being regarded as a bellwether for the 2022 midterms, with Democrats trying to turn it into a referendum on former President Donald Trump and Republicans trying to turn it into a referendum on current President Joe Biden. But the contest may also be a different kind of preview of 2022 and 2024: The role poll watchers, seemingly inspired by Trump’s election fraud lies, will play in upcoming cycles.
As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, a surge of GOP election observers are flooding the Virginia gubernatorial race, apparently driven by the party’s push to ensure the system’s “integrity”—the euphemism allies of the former president have used to enact voter suppression laws and sow distrust in the democratic process. The 2020 election was not “rigged,” as Trump continues to claim, and even Youngkin, a MAGA Republican, has publicly acknowledged that Biden was legitimately elected. But Trump’s incessant lies, including sketchy accusations of cheating in Virginia, have driven an influx of volunteers to turn out as a “line of defense against election fraud.”
“You’ve all got to be out there,” Clara Belle Wheeler, a former Virginia elections official, said at a conservative training event for prospective poll watchers recently, per the Post. “You’re the front line of defense.”
Poll watching is legal in most states and something both parties do. But the monitoring has been infused with greater drama in the 2020 cycle, as Trump and his allies spread conspiracy theories about a “rigged” process in which the election was stolen from him and Republican election observers were not given proper access in key states. None of that was true, but it has persisted into this off-year race as well: “The Virginia governor’s election—you better watch it,” Trump said on a conservative radio program last month. “You have a close race in Virginia, but it’s not close if they cheat.”
That remark echoed his call during a presidential debate last year for his supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully”—a line that was seen as an encouragement of voter intimidation. “The president is blatantly urging his supporters to congregate at polling places, go inside, and ostensibly harass and intimidate voters,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said at the time. “While there are authorized ‘poll watchers’ who monitor polls on Election Day, their duties are clearly laid out, and they do not include what President Trump has suggested.”
Since the election, Trump’s election lies have fueled Republican attempts to severely restrict voting, along with “a concerted legislative push to grant more autonomy and access to partisan poll watchers,” New York Times reported in May. Such efforts have “alarmed election officials and voting rights activists,” with the Brennan Center’s Michael Waldman telling the Times that aggressive poll watchers were “a longstanding barrier to voting in the United States, and it was also largely solved. And this risks bringing it back.”
Some local election officials have suggested that the influx of poll watchers could help deflate some conspiracy theories about the voting system. “I really think it’s a result of all the stuff in the news media about there being fraud in the election process last year,” Loudoun County election registrar Judy Brown told the Post, describing a two-to-one ratio of GOP observers to Democratic ones in her district. “They can come to the same conclusion as we do: that there is no fraud in the process.” The concern, though, is that a surge of volunteers rooted in a pro-Trump conspiracy theory could be less about safeguarding the integrity of the election and more about intimidating voters. “2020 proved to us how Democrats cheated,” One America News host Christina Bobb claimed on the MAGA propaganda network last week. “What can you do? Volunteer to be a poll worker. Virginia’s governor’s election is November 2nd…Are there enough volunteers bold enough to ask questions of suspicious people doing suspicious things? We need bold people working the polls.”
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