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When President Trump used the prime-time debate last week to urge his supporters to “go to the polls and watch very carefully,” he was not simply calling for a grassroots movement or raising the possibility of tactics. intimidation in voting. sites. He also nodded to an extensive behind-the-scenes effort led by his campaign attorneys and operatives.
Over the summer, Trump appointed a new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who was once a top adviser to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie before being fired amid the “Bridgegate” scandal. Stepien quickly raised a group of lieutenants focused on using aggressive electoral tactics, moves that led to Marc E. Elias, the Democratic Party’s top election attorney, Tweet that Trump was “tripling” in “opposing voting rights.”
One of the main architects of the effort is Justin Clark, who Stepien promoted to deputy campaign manager. He has been viewed with suspicion among Democrats since he was recorded last year saying, “Traditionally, Republicans have always suppressed votes in some places,” adding that in 2020 the party “would start to play a little offensive.”
Other key figures in the campaign include a high-level aide who once oversaw a right-wing intelligence gathering operation for the conservative Koch brothers; an aide who participated in a secret ballot challenge operation for President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004; and a campaign attorney who is coordinating a series of lawsuits aimed at preventing the expansion of vote by mail.
With polls showing that Trump is behind Joseph R. Biden Jr. nationally and in most undecided states, the president has increasingly turned his attention to the voting process, declaring that the only way he could Losing is if the election is rigged and you refuse to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Less than a month before the elections, his campaign has transferred the idea of voting irregularities to the head of his ground operations and his legal strategy.
The campaign is trying to shape the voting process in many ways. Following the president’s lead, he has waged a legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail, claiming without evidence that it is riddled with fraud. He’s also pushing the boundaries of traditional poll monitoring in ways that many Democrats believe amount to voter intimidation. And it has put legal pressure on states to aggressively purge their voter rolls.
Campaign officials tried to downplay the Democratic anxiety and insisted they wanted everyone who wanted to vote.
“I think we have to realize that we are on a political campaign and that we are all following the law,” Clark said in an interview. “There are laws everywhere on how many feet you can stand outside of a polling place and what you can wear and what you can do.”
Few of the campaign’s practices have attracted as much attention as its extensive plans for survey observation. While both parties have trained official election observers for decades, the president has raised the alarm among Democrats and some voting experts who fear he is encouraging extralegal threats at polling places by far-right groups and even supporters. random Trump.
In the debate, Trump said the Proud Boys, a far-right group, should “stay out of it,” a comment some interpreted as a call to arms to aid their electoral prospects in ways that could intimidate voters.
Those fears were intensified by an episode in Fairfax, Virginia, last month, when Trump supporters disrupted early voting, preventing access to a polling site.
“These are not trained poll workers, they are not people who were recruited to do something,” Clark said. “There is, surprise, there will be politics in a presidential race. And people are going to wave flags and display things and drive and have mini-rallies and poster rallies and do things like that, and it happens in a lot of places. “
Clark and other campaign officials have said they will put 50,000 election observers on the ground, including at least 1,600 in Philadelphia alone. They are instructing them to record minutiae such as the timing of paper jams at polling places, but they are also going beyond typical activity by monitoring people who collect absentee ballots and videotape the mailboxes where they are deposited. . Trump has even raised the idea of sending sheriffs to the polls.
Republican administrations in several states, including the Georgia battlefield, have appointed anti-fraud task forces that they say are designed to root out cheating, although Democrats see panels, packed with Republican prosecutors, as tools voter suppression.
“These come out of someone’s Republican playbook,” said Cathy Cox, a Democrat who served as Georgia’s secretary of state. “Unfortunately, the goal is to intimidate people and ultimately suppress the votes.”
A Trump campaign official recently emailed party officials in North Carolina, telling them “not to follow the procedures outlined” in a memo sent by the state Board of Elections. Republican officials have also been linked to efforts to help third-party candidates who could sway votes from Biden.
The most visible Republican effort is in the courts. Matthew Morgan, who was promoted to campaign attorney this summer, had been leading a wave of election litigation and defying attempts to expand voting by mail. Like Trump, he has disparaged voting by mail, asserting without proof that “universal vote by mail opens the door to chaos and fraud.”
Election day operations are now coordinated by Michael Roman, a Philadelphia native who once oversaw an operation for billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch that monitored and collected information on liberal adversaries. He frequently makes unsubstantiated claims that Democrats are conspiring to “steal the election.” Mr. Roman also played a central role in promoting a 2008 video of two New Black Panther Party members outside a Philadelphia polling place, one of them holding a baton; The video became a long-running flashpoint for claims by the right-wing media about election interference by Democrats.
“This is someone I think has a reputation for exaggerating and distorting incidents to make it look like Democrats are cheating, and I think it adds to a general dangerous message about voter fraud,” said Richard L. Hasen, professor of University of California, Irvine School of Law, who writes the widely read Voting Law blog.
Roman declined to comment for this article.
Other notable figures working for the campaign include Bob Paduchik, a senior campaign adviser, who participated in a secret operation during the 2004 Bush campaign, dubbed the “Election Rules Fraud Strategy.” The effort was aimed at challenging the legitimacy of absentee voters, according to emails published in a lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee.
Paduchik did not respond to requests for comment.
Survey observation is regulated by different state laws. In official training videos, Republicans instruct workers to be courteous to Democrats, dress appropriately, and stay alert: “Don’t stray.”
This year, for the first time in more than three decades, the Republican National Committee is playing an active role in observing the elections, after the courts in 2018 lifted a consent decree that had prohibited the RNC from doing so. The ban was due to the committee’s involvement in an operation to intimidate New Jersey voters in 1981.
There are already signs that Republicans, who have won only one popular presidential vote since 1988, will be unusually aggressive. In recent weeks, the Trump campaign sent personnel to try to enter the satellite facilities in Philadelphia, where voters could collect and fill out ballots by mail, offices that are not considered voting centers. (In an interview, Mr. Morgan rejected that concept, saying, “They say this is not a polling place. To us this sounds absurd, when you can register, get your ballot, and vote there. So no.” I accept that premise “).
Republican-led states are also working to restrict voting access; in Texas, for example, Governor Greg Abbott moved last week to close many of the places where voters can drop off their ballots.
Campaign officials said they had not been in contact with any outside groups to tacitly encourage or support unofficial election surveillance and protests at voting sites, beyond the official election observation activity that typically occurs. And they were confident that the kind of intimidation tactics that led to the consent decree would not be repeated.
“This is why we are recruiting people,” Clark said. “We are training them, we are working with them to make sure they are doing things the right way.”
Still, Trump sparked alarm in last week’s debate by being ambiguous when asked to condemn the Proud Boys; he only denounced them later amid criticism after the debate. When asked by The New York Times, the campaign also refused to resign from such groups.
Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director of counterintelligence, said the president’s comments could be interpreted by violent right-wing groups as “a call to action, a call to arms.” Figliuzzi said online communications from the organizations reveal they are making plans to meet at polling stations.
“There are specific posts, from the Proud Boys, for example, that encourage him,” Figliuzzi said during a call by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, a voting rights group.
These groups also flag curiously timed and seemingly alarmist announcements of voter fraud investigations stemming from petty incidents. The Justice Department, for example, announced that it was launching an investigation after a handful of ballots were found in a trash can in Pennsylvania, apparently accidentally discarded by a contract worker. It was a highly unusual step, coming as the Trump administration weakened long-standing department policy that discouraged going public with voter fraud investigations before the election.
Like the Justice Department, the Trump campaign also amplifies its message.
“We’ve all seen the tweets about voter fraud and blah blah blah,” Clark said when it was recorded last year, referring to Trump’s claims. “Every time we’re with him, he asks, ‘What are we doing about voter fraud, what are we doing about electoral fraud?'”
Clark added, “He’s committed to this.”
Susan Beachy contributed research.
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