Republicans in the battleground Badger State say they’ve got an army of election observers ready for duty this Election Day. But one volunteer who will be observing at Milwaukee polls is raising concerns about what he sees as the GOP’s timid approach to checking threats on election integrity.
The source, who asked to remain anonymous, attended a recent Zoom training session for attorney observers led by the Republican National Lawyers Association. The session was off the record and closed to the press, but the source sent the video recording of the Zoom meeting to The Federalist because he said he was concerned that the people serving as frontline guardians of election integrity may be going much too gently into that good Election Night.
“This is the first time I had not heard, ‘Don’t be afraid to assert your rights’ in some form,” the veteran elections observer told me in a phone interview from Wisconsin.
RNLA trainers leading the session stressed that the job of the monitoring attorneys is to be the association’s “eyes and ears,” to serve as a deterrent for misconduct and election fraud, but to do so without being “confrontational.” That’s understandable advice from Milwaukee election veterans who lived through 2020, when poll watchers were blocked from viewing and some were threatened with removal under the cover of Covid distance restrictions.
With the phony narrative pushed by corporate media that election workers are under constant threat from “election deniers,” power-tripping chief inspectors might be on hair-trigger edge
