President Donald Trump said Thursday that he wants to expose officials to polling places in November to protect against voter fraud, although it is not clear if he can do so legally.
Proponents of voting rights have expressed concern that even if Trump’s idea does not materialize, it could discourage some voters from going to the polls. It is the latest in a series of statements indicating Trump’s interest in influencing how people vote in the November presidential election.
“We will have everything,” President Sean Hannity told Fox News. “We will have sheriffs, and we will enforce law, and we will, hopefully, have American lawyers, and we will have everyone and generals of lawyers.”
Federal law prohibits officials from sending “armed men” to “any place where a general or special election is held,” and only local officials influence deputies of police and sheriffs. But its messaging could inspire local action, and even the prospect of authority figures such as police holding polling stations could have the effect of intimidating voters and discouraging them from voting.
“This is just such an old, dirty tactic of oppressing voters,” Kristen Clarke of the Law Committee on Civil Rights Under Law told the Washington Post. “There is no doubt that this is about instilling anxiety and depression in participating in color communities.”
In recent years, civic groups organizing to look for voter fraud have recruited people to serve as election watchdogs in elections. The Republican National Committee has also launched a campaign to recruit about 50,000 pollsters to run in the November general election.
That was made possible by the 2018 birth of a decades-old consent decision meant to protect against exactly what Trump proposed on Fox News. In the early 1980s, Democrats accused the RNC of intimidating voters because of a program of off-duty lawmakers who patrolled elections in predominantly Black and Latino areas.
The Democratic National Committee filed a case, and the RNC passed a federal consent decision agreeing not to follow such “voting control measures.” For decades, the RNC has been cautiously avoiding activities that could be interpreted as voter repression, leaving the orchestration of pollwatch programs to campaigns and local organizations.
That means this fall will mark the first presidential election in decades in which the group will be able to spearhead activities on poll-watching. The RNC has said that its new polling watch program will not include law enforcement officials, but will rely on citizens’ volunteers, that volunteers will target both Democratic and GOP-paid areas, and that they intend to be careful to comply legally. to be, so as not to be subject to another consent decision.
Trump has long doubted safe voting methods
Trump’s remarks are the latest in a series suggesting he is interested in Americans’ confidence in the election results and discouragement of certain types of voting.
The president has long rails against voting via mail-in, which he claims is ripe for fraud and manipulation. There is not much evidence to support that claim, but civil rights lawyers have raised concerns that the repeated messages could affect voters in electoral systems.
His campaign recently claimed that he is in fact only opposed to universal post-in-votes – instead of absent as opt-in mail-in-vote – which only a small number of states plan to do in the fall.
But the public has clearly not gotten the distinction: Republican voters seem to heed more of the president’s warning than Democrats, and are asking some local Republican parties to support it despite the rhetoric of post-in-votes.
Trump has also repeatedly criticized the U.S. Postal Service as costly and ineffective. Last week, he told Fox News that he was opposed to $ 25 billion in proposed additional funding for the Postal Service because he did not want it to be used for voting via mail. He has suggested giving back $ 3.6 billion in election funding to states to help prepare for local election systems for the pandemic, including facilitating post-vote voting.
“They need that money to work the Post Office so it can take all these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “But if they don’t get those two articles, that means you can not have universal mail-in-vote because they are not equipped to have it.”
So is he proposed delay the elections in 2020 “until people can vote well, safely and securely.”
All of these messages have already influenced how Americans think about the election. A poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal indicated that 45 percent of Americans believe that votes in the 2020 election will be counted accurately – down from 59 percent who believed so in 2016. About three-quarters of Republicans also believe that post-in votes will not be counted exactly.
While Trump continues to question the methods of voting in the fall, experts fear voting that it could delegitimize the results of the November election – another chaotic turn in an already tumultuous election year.
