Trump is organizing his own Brown Shirts

gwb-trading said:
In the hallway a group prayed for "evil to descend" on the "election team," said the county's Republican clerk Chuck Broerman. "It's astonishing to me to hear something like that."
More...
Christianity witch (sic) is nothing other than dressed up witchcraft, the casting of spells.
 
gwb-trading said:
This is nothing more than Trump and his surrogates raising an army of people whose intent is to disrupt the election.

What is interesting is that there are states (mainly red ones) which allow the "watchers" to also be “challengers" who can stop you from voting for any excuse whatsoever. Even if you bring your passport and drivers license to prove your citizenship and home address -- these challengers can ignore the proof and demand that you not be allowed to cast your ballot.

Obviously this "poll watcher" system needs significant reform when its intent becomes disrupting elections rather than insuring their smooth operation.

'Stop the steal' supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/stop-steal-supporters-train-thousands-us-poll-observers-2022-10-13/

Inside the El Paso County clerk's office in Colorado, where officials had gathered in July to recount votes in a Republican nominating contest for this year's midterms, dozens of angry election watchers pounded on the windows, at times yelling at workers and recording them with cell phones.

In the hallway a group prayed for "evil to descend" on the "election team," said the county's Republican clerk Chuck Broerman. "It's astonishing to me to hear something like that." The election watchers had showed up to observe a five-day recount of votes for four Republican candidates who claimed the primary was fraudulent in a contest where they faced other Republicans.

Protesters had mobilized outside the clerk's office, holding signs with the signature "Stop the Steal" slogan of former President Donald Trump and demanding the county get rid of its voting machines.

As the United States enters the final stretch to November’s midterm elections, Reuters documented multiple incidents of intimidation involving an expanding army of election observers, many of them recruited by prominent Republican Party figures and activists echoing Trump's false theories about election fraud. The widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election as alleged by Trump and his supporters was never proven.

Interviews with more than two dozen election officials as well as representatives of groups driven by false theories about election fraud, and an examination of poll-watching training materials, revealed an intensifying grassroots effort to recruit activists. This has heightened alarm that disturbances in this year's primary contests could foreshadow problems in November's local, state and national races.

Officials and experts worry the campaign will deepen the distrust about America's election process and lead to further harassment and threats to already besieged election workers.

Election officials in three other states -- North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada -- reported similar incidents. In 16 North Carolina counties alone, officials noted unusually aggressive observers during May's primary elections, according to a state election board survey. Some attempted to take photographs of sensitive voting equipment or intimidated voters at polling places, in violation of North Carolina's election laws.

During early voting in Arizona's Pima County, an election observer was told to put away binoculars; another was caught looking at private voter data, and another was asked to stop making comments about “fraudulent elections,” according to a September report by the county recorder's office reviewed by Reuters. State law forbids voter intimidation and obstructing election workers.

Pima county recorder Gabriella Cazares-Kelly said her election staff received multiple complaints from voters that individuals were shouting at them from outside the 75-foot circumference around polling stations, where interaction with voters is banned. "The concern is it makes them feel unwelcome," said Cazares-Kelly.

In Nevada's Washoe County, people with night vision goggles stood outside the registrar's building and aimed their cameras at election workers counting votes on primary night in June, two Washoe County officials told Reuters.

Poll watchers have been a feature of American democracy since the 18th century, recruited by parties and candidates and regulated by state laws and local rules. People from both parties keep an eye on the voting - and each other - to make sure things go smoothly. In some places, poll “watchers” are different from “challengers,” who can point out people they suspect aren't legal voters. In other states, poll watchers also do the challenging.

Groups that question the legitimacy of the 2020 vote have helped recruit thousands of observers who support dramatic changes to how Americans vote, including doing away with voting machines and returning to hand-counted paper ballots.

Officials say they are concerned observers intent on rooting out so-called voter fraud could cause unnecessary disruptions and long lines at polling places on Election Day.

"It's a real concern," said Al Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who received death threats after the 2020 election for refuting false claims of voter fraud. "If these people show up to the polls with the intention of disrupting voting from taking place, then I can't imagine a worse threat to democracy than that."

Sandy Kiesel, who heads the Election Integrity Force in Michigan, said her poll "challengers" will be trained to be "polite, respectful and to obey the law.

"We're not about trying to hassle poll workers," Kiesel told Reuters. "It's about transparency. If we can all see what's going on, maybe we wouldn't have these arguments whether elections are free and fair."

REPUBLICAN SUPPORT
In early October, an election-denying group called Audit the Vote PA held a Zoom meeting with almost 80 people that was billed as a "deep dive" poll watcher training session. The Pennsylvania group says Democrat Joe Biden's 2020 win in the state was illegitimate.

During the call, which Reuters attended, participants compared notes on how to observe the testing of voting machines and when a hand count of votes can be requested, and discussed the legality of taking photographs in polling locations.

Toni Shuppe, Audit the Vote's CEO, declined multiple requests for an interview with Reuters, but confirmed the group is "focused on encouraging people to become poll watchers in the upcoming November midterms elections."

Andrea Raffle, the Republican National Committee's director for election integrity in Pennsylvania, told participants on the call they had already filled 6,000 poll watcher positions in the state this year, compared with 1,000 in 2020. Raffle referred a request for comment to the RNC's national office.

Election conspiracy groups also often appear at events with Republican officials, focused on recruiting volunteers to help watch the polls, according to the groups themselves and county officials. The Republican Party said it welcomes volunteers from many different groups, expects them to respect the law and to follow the party's training. "Our program is independent of anything else," said RNC spokesperson Danielle Alvarez.

The RNC has been pouring resources into recruiting observers and workers since being freed from the restrictions of a court-ordered consent decree in 2018. It expects to have trained over 52,000 poll watchers and workers between November last year and the coming election; it said comparative numbers for past elections were unavailable. The consent decree, which sharply limited the party's ability to challenge voters' qualifications, was put in place after the RNC, during a 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey, engaged in intimidation tactics targeted at minority voters.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said they did not have a national number because state party offices manage their poll watcher recruitment. But the DNC says it has hired five staffers to work in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Texas to counter efforts to subvert the electoral process, including ballot counting and the certification of results.

GROWING NUMBERS IN NORTH CAROLINA
In North Carolina's rural Henderson County, as voters cast ballots in May's primary elections, aggressive groups turned up.

Observers demanded to inspect voting machine tabulators in violation of state election laws. Others repeatedly grilled poll workers or demanded to take pictures inside voting stations. When told to stop, they said they were following guidance from a Republican Party lawyer, said Henderson County Election Director Karen Hebb.

"It was stressful," she said. "If we refused to let the observers do something, they said you know you can be sued if you don't allow us."

She contacted the sheriff's department after an observer trailed a poll worker's car from a polling site to the election board. She said the sheriff's office told her no laws had been broken. The Henderson County Sheriff's Office did not respond to requests for comment.

In typical years, eight to 10 observers each from the Democrat and Republican parties would observe the county's elections, Hebb said. This year, she had nearly 30 Republican Party observers alone, compared to the usual number of Democrats.

Some of the Republican observers later identified themselves as members of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group linked to a nationwide effort led by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican election lawyer and promoter of voter fraud theories who joined Trump's legal team in his effort to overturn the result of the 2020 elections.

As head of the Election Integrity Network, Mitchell is training election observers and is trying to build grassroots networks of conservatives ahead of the midterms. In the first six months of 2022, her network hosted a series of training sessions for activists in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona.

Although Mitchell and other activists say the effort is nonpartisan, the project is funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Washington nonprofit organization with deep ties to Trump's political network. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is listed as the organization’s “senior partner.” Trump’s political action committee, Save America, gave the group $1 million in 2021, campaign finance records show. Meadows and Mitchell did not return requests for comment.

The prospect of scores of unofficial observers turning up at polls already convinced the election system is rigged and assuming election officials are corrupt is a "tinder box" that could easily explode, said Chris Harvey, Georgia’s election director in 2020.

"People are passionate about politics, and if there's anger and confrontation at the polls, it gets ugly and really dangerous really quickly," he said.
More...

The MAGA "Poll Watchers" are setting the table for more election chaos while threatening poll workers.

MAGA Duo Who Smeared Election Worker Now Holding Training Courses for ‘Poll Watchers’
Elections officials are bracing for a wave of aggressive poll observers, including some notorious veterans from the 2020 election
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-...ow-holding-training-courses-for-poll-watchers
 
The MAGA Brownshirts are already out there illegally intimidating voters.

Report of voter intimidation referred to Department of Justice, Arizona Secretary of State's office says
The alleged intimidation happened outside the Mesa location for the second time in two weeks
https://www.abc15.com/news/politica...ntimidation-referred-to-department-of-justice

An official with the Arizona Secretary of State’s office has confirmed that they have referred a report of voter intimidation to the Department of Justice and Arizona's attorney general.

The SOS office tells ABC15 that a voter was approached and followed by a group of individuals, while “the voter was trying to drop off their ballot at an early voting drop box on Monday,” an email stated.

Maricopa County has two official drop box locations in the county — one outside their main election tabulation center in downtown Phoenix and another in Mesa outside the Juvenile Justice Court.

The alleged intimidation happened outside the Mesa location.

“The SOS has talked to the voter, informed Maricopa County, and referred the report to the DOJ and AG’s offices for further investigation,” a spokesperson wrote.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1582901243038486528

Last week, ABC15 shared there were reports of people in the vicinity of the very same drop box location in Mesa.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer did not elaborate during a press conference last week on who the group is, but expressed concern if a voter becomes confronted, “Any attempt to deter, intimidate a lawful voter is unlawful, should be immediately reported, please to us, but also law enforcement.”

Mail-in ballots can be dropped off at any of the 12 open voting locations, or a United States Postal Service drop box as well.

Richer said there are cameras on the two ballot drop box locations they have.

There have been calls by activists across social media for volunteers to watch ballot drop box locations in different counties across Arizona. There are concerns about what the intentions would be, and how untrained groups would be watching.
 
Some people with integrity are attempting to stand up to Trunp's brownshirts and all of their threats.

Targeted with death threats, GOP election overseer now works to defend voter integrity
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/e...ath-threats-donald-trump/stories/202210230116

Al Schmidt, a former Republican Philadelphia commissioner, remembers the day he was singled out by the most powerful man in the world.

Then came the death threats.

For months, the 51-year-old civil servant was tasked with others in Philadelphia to oversee the process that would determine who would win the 2020 presidential election.

With 253 electoral votes already collected across the country for Joe Biden, Pennsylvania's 20 were critical.

Then came the tweet from President Donald Trump saying Mr. Schmidt was being “used” to cover up voter fraud. “He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption and dishonesty.”


Suddenly, a torrent of messages aimed at Mr. Schmidt and his family members would change their lives.


The attackers threatened his wife. One of them included the names and ages of their three children, and said they “will be fatally shot.” Another sent him a photo of his house.

“What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children,” he told the U.S. Senate Rules Committee last October.

While vote counting was still underway in Philadelphia’s convention center in 2020, police rounded up two men from Virginia carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle and loaded handguns outside the building.

Mr. Schmidt has since resigned his post, but has now entered a new realm of politics.

For the past year, he and a growing number of others have been trying to convince people across the state to do whatever they can to protect a voting process that’s now under siege.

They are part of an expanding movement of people in the country who say they are fighting to break through misinformation about the integrity of voting systems and educate an increasingly skeptical public about the nuts and bolts of a process that has been an underpinning of American society since its founding.

In North Carolina, the once-obscure agency that oversees elections has a team dedicated to combating election lies that flow freely on social media. In Washington, The Brookings Institution is urging states to form quick-reaction teams that scour the internet for falsehoods and swoop in to debunk them before they explode into conspiracy theories.

For months, advocates have been pressuring social media giants to spend some of their vast profits to crack down on election lies.

Here in Pennsylvania, Mr. Schmidt, president of the public-interest advocacy group Committee of Seventy, joined with a Philadelphia journalist and two election experts on Wednesday in the first of three online events aimed at pulling back the curtain on elections.

In an age of chaos and doubt over elections, their goal of explaining the election process may have never been more important.

“You have to engage. You can’t just say ‘oh, well, let’s go back to another election,’ ” said Chris Borick, a pollster and political scientist at Muhlenberg College. "You’ve got a big section of the electorate that does not trust or accept the results.”

Nowhere is the public’s mistrust deeper than on mail ballots — which are now game changers in major elections across the country — the focus of Wednesday’s event.

Organized by the groups All Voting is Local, the Committee of Seventy and the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, the program targeted some of the falsehoods that have led to violent threats against election workers in more than a dozen states.

The distrust has grown so deep that more than half of all voters believe mail voting poses a threat to democracy, and a third classify that threat as “major,” according to a New York Times/Sienna Poll released Tuesday. The vast majority of Republicans — 82% in all — say it’s a threat, compared to half of all independents and 27% of Democrats.

Nearly three in 10 voters don’t trust that the 2022 midterm election results will be accurate, the poll found. Among Republicans, that distrust is shared by 41% of voters.

In 2020, conspiracy theorists, election deniers and even foreign actors took isolated problems and spun a tale of widespread fraud that’s still told today.

“We saw that information blown out of proportion. We saw the compounding effect of spreading misinformation,” said Brendan Egan, a technology entrepreneur and cybersecurity expert.

“As each person spreads it, the story gets worse and worse and worse until you end up with one horrific story that the election was stolen.”

Attack on mail voting

Education projects aim to push back with hard facts, and in Pennsylvania, they’re starting with mail voting.

That practice underwent a sea change in the 2020 election, thanks to a sweeping reform of Pennsylvania’s election law enacted in 2019. Before the law, known as Act 77, took effect, Pennsylvanians needed a medical excuse or some other reason to cast their ballot by mail.

Now, any eligible voter can do so by mail.

At the time the law was passed, Republicans and Democrats alike hailed it as a rare bipartisan victory that would help generations of voters.

For the GOP, it was a way to lock in votes from elderly supporters who might have a hard time making it to the polls.

“People have been voting by absentee ballot in Pennsylvania at least as far back as the Civil War,” said Jefff Greenberg, who served as Mercer County’s elections director from 2007 through 2020 and took part in Wednesday’s event.

But as the 2020 election drew near, Mr. Trump, trailing in the polls, unleashed a fury against mail-in voting that would change the way Americans looked at elections.

The attacks by the president came just as mail voting was on a sudden, sharp rise across the country while COVID-19 ran rampant and health officials struggled to contain the deadly pandemic.

Suddenly, what had been a practice used by both parties became one more weapon in partisan warfare. Mr. Trump’s supporters echoed his baseless accusations that the mail-in votes were rife with fraud, and Republican politicians quickly flipped.

State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who built a political following by amplifying the lies about the election, was attacked during his own primary this year as “Mail-in Mastriano” because he voted for Act 77.

He has since introduced legislation that would allow voters to repeal the reform.

“Mail voting has become this lightning rod,” Mr. Borick said. “People like the former president made it an issue. When you get a lot of cues from those who have big voices, it’ll have big impacts.”

Sixty-six percent of people who voted for Mr. Trump, and 62% of Republicans overall, still believe that he was the winner of the 2020 election, the Times/Sienna poll found.

“We should be worried,” said Mr. Borick. “One of the absolute glories of American democracy is that, while there’s bitter partisan fights, when the elections are over, it’s, ‘OK, these are our legitimate leaders.’ That doesn’t mean we have to like what they say, but we have to recognize them.

“These questions about [voting] process are impacting that legitimacy.”

Knocking down myths

For people like Mr. Schmidt, that starts with knocking down the myths that are now undermining elections.

Some of the problems are rooted in fundamental misunderstandings that fuel conspiracy theories and sow doubt about the security of mail voting. It can even be something as simple as a person getting more than one application for a mail ballot — which happens regularly when parties try to entice their supporters by sending applications to their homes.

All of a sudden, people are accusing election workers of letting people vote twice, but that doesn’t happen.

Regardless of how many times a person applies for a ballot, they only get one.

“There’s nothing magical about that piece of paper. It’s simply an application,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Filing an application triggers a multi-step process to verify a voter’s registration, and double check that they haven’t moved or died.

“We’re able to keep up with you and make sure we’re not mailing ballots to where they’re not supposed to go,” said Dori Sawyer, voter services director for Montgomery County and the third election official to speak Wednesday.

Nor can a voter return a mail ballot and then cast a regular ballot in person, she said.

“Every ballot return envelope has a bar code on it,” Ms. Sawyer said. Counties scan each envelope before they’re mailed.

“That triggers a couple of things.”

First, it updates the state-run ballot tracking system so the voter can keep tabs on their ballot’s whereabouts.

Second, it updates the county’s own records to ensure they can’t vote twice by coming into the polling station.

The biggest hole in the mail-voting process isn’t on the voter’s end — it’s in state law.

Pennsylvania is among a minority of states that doesn’t allow county election workers to begin processing mail ballots until the morning of the election.

In the run-up to that day, the ballots stream in, day after day, piling up in bins that collect the ballots for each voting district. There they wait, untouched, until state law says the county can get to work on them.

That’s when sparks can fly.

While ordinary county employees are carrying out critical — and often mind-numbing — work, politicians and partisans outside the election center’s walls rile up their supporters by accusing the workers of rigging the votes they’re just trying to count.

Consider just the first two steps that workers take to protect the sanctity of the votes. First they start by checking the outer envelope to make sure the voter signed and dated it. Then they open that outer envelope and pull out the secrecy envelope.

The secrecy envelopes are often moved elsewhere in the counting facility, where yet more poll workers slice them open, pull out the ballots, unfold and flatten them, and, finally, start feeding them into scanners.

All along the way, people representing candidates watch the scene unfold, looking for any hint of cheating.

“That whole, very mundane assembly line takes a lot of time,” Mr. Schmidt said. In Philadelphia in 2020, that process had to be repeated 375,000 times — once for every mail ballot the county received during the presidential election. Allegheny County had almost as many: 340,000.

It can delay the results of major races for days or even weeks.

The Associated Press didn’t call Pennsylvania for Mr. Biden until the Saturday after the election. By then, the vote count had been under withering attack by Mr. Trump and his allies all week, and his voters began pressuring elected officials to reject the results.

County leaders have for years been asking lawmakers in Harrisburg to allow them to do what 37 other states do: speed up the process by getting them ready for counting as they come in.

Lawmakers in Harrisburg failed to fix that problem, even though they were warned of the chaos it could cause in the run-up to the 2020 election and saw the corrosive aftermath.

‘This is domestic terrorism’

With two of the country’s highest-stakes races for governor and U.S. Senate — both of which have Trump-endorsed candidates who cast doubt on his 2020 defeat — some fear another delay could lead yet more Americans to falsely believe their elections are rigged.

“It’s a big problem with an easy solution,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s frustrating to know we’re going to face it again in a couple of weeks.”

That can lead to real-world consequences for people laboring at a necessary job — something Mr. Schmidt knows all too well. The pressure is taking its toll. Since 2020, more than half of Pennsylvania’s counties lost at least one of their top election officials.

“I have three little kids,” Mr. Schmidt said told the Senate Rules Committee a year ago. “My youngest is seven years old. No matter what our party affiliation, this is not okay. And let’s be clear: this is domestic terrorism. The whole point is to terrorize.”
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top