The civics-textbook description of a poll monitor’s job is straightforward enough: to be a watchdog of the vote, so candidates, political parties and the public can have confidence that elections are both honest and transparent.
But the work has changed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race, when Donald J. Trump and his allies used information gathered by Republican monitors as part of their attempts to overturn the election results.
This year, the party and its allies have recruited an expanded group of monitors — volunteers chosen to observe voting firsthand inside polling places. They include many who believe the 2020 election was stolen and have been trained to be aggressive in the search for fraud.
Their activities include documenting disputes and irregularities at polling places. In some cases, volunteers are given lists of voters whose eligibility they could challenge, according to recordings of training sessions and meetings reviewed by The New York Times.
Many of those voters have been selected using computer programs that experts say use fundamentally flawed methodology.
Such challenges could become part of disputes if an election is extremely close — or used as fodder to try to sow doubt in the results, election officials and other experts say.
More than two dozen election officials surveyed by The Times said that as early voting got underway, they didn’t see signs of mass challenges or disturbances at the polls.
In the past, the parties and voting advocacy groups have provided estimates about the number of monitors or their potential effects that proved inflated.
But the greater worry is whether more disruption will come on Election Day or after, in the form of challenges and litigation that could clog the gears of the electoral process or disrupt the count in states around the country.
“People will see things, record things, take pictures, take it out of context and use it to mislead the public as to what’s happening,” said Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials. “Unfortunately, I’m sure it will happen. I just don’t know where, or when, or what.”
The Republican National Committee claims to have enlisted 230,000 volunteers for poll monitoring and other observation positions nationwide. That figure dwarfs numbers touted or delivered in past elections, although the committee declined to say whether all of the recruits had finished the party’s training regimen or were likely to show up at the polls.
The Republican training sessions stress that monitors should behave with civility. Standard presentation slides in a number of trainings state: “Do know the process and observe,” as well as, “Do know and always respect voting rights and laws protecting them. Don’t be disrespectful.”
To fill the ranks, Republican officials have recruited from members of grass-roots groups who believe the 2020 election was stolen and have been trained to search for fraud aggressively.
The party has coordinated with the Election Integrity Network, a national assemblage of some 30 state groups that organized in response to election conspiracy theories that arose after the 2020 election. Some have conducted intricate trainings telling attendees, in one state’s case, to act like a “sentry” in a “military organization.”
The network is run by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who played a central role in trying to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss. Its aim is to transform the way elections are run. State chapters have trained poll monitors, although the total number is unclear.
Ms. Mitchell said in a statement that she was proud of the work the network had done and that poll monitoring from citizen observers was “a critical component of honest and open elections.’’
In a statement, the spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, Danielle Alvarez, called the trainees patriots who would “bring transparency and accountability to our election process.” She also framed the effort as a fight against what she said were attempts from Democrats to “weaken the elections.”
This is the second presidential election since the Republican Party was freed from a federal court order barring it from mounting efforts against voter fraud. The order was first imposed in 1982 after the party used fraud as a pretense to suppress votes by members of minority groups.
In fact, voter fraud is exceedingly rare, despite widespread claims from Mr. Trump and other Republicans in recent years that Democrats rig elections. Scores of subsequent recounts, audits and studies, some conducted by Republicans, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020 turned up no evidence of widespread problems with the vote.
Partisans from both parties regularly work as election observers inside the polls, not just watching for any improper conduct, but performing overtly political tasks like updating party officials on who has and has not voted. And Democrats also train poll monitors and workers, but with an emphasis on stopping voter suppression, not fraud.
Poll monitors, and in some cases even poll workers, in many states are credentialed with local election offices through the political parties.
The pro-Trump effort this year depends on a degree of coordination between Republican officials and local affiliates of Ms. Mitchell’s group. The emphasis is not simply on spotting voting irregularities, but on collecting information about what happens in polling places and election offices.
But the monitors also could prove helpful if there are efforts by Mr. Trump or other candidates to dispute election results.
In recent weeks, allies of the Trump campaign have filed scores of lawsuits in battleground states that could set the stage for post-election challenges to various elements of the voting process.
Some trainings are focused on gathering information, with participants told to note anything that could be used in lawsuits.
A poll observer’s main duty is to “document, document document,” Mike Hoffman, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity director for Wisconsin, told trainees in May.
“There’s no such thing as over-documentation,” he said. “A short pencil is better than a long memory.”
Both national Republican and state Election Integrity Network officials have encouraged trainees to seek paid jobs as poll workers or as temporary workers in election offices.
“We really, really want to focus on getting as many people in these positions because that’s the kind of access that we’re not going to get as authorized representatives,” Heather Honey, who heads the Pennsylvania chapter of the network, said in one session.
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And challenges to voters’ eligibility seem certain.
In North Carolina’s Election Integrity Network affiliate, members are preparing to challenge thousands of voters after they have mailed in ballots, Jim Womack, the president of the North Carolina branch, said in an interview. State law allows challenges to mail-in ballots up to five days after Election Day.
The purpose, he said in a call to members in August, is to create a reason for contesting a close loss. If a candidate knows “questionable votes that were cast,” he said, “they could use this information that we have potentially to challenge the election.”
Election laws in most battleground states make such mass challenges difficult, if not impossible. But in a special election in suburban Milwaukee in July, police officers were called to remove right-wing activists, registered as election observers at two polling places, who sought to challenge every absentee ballot even after being told they were disobeying the law.
Celestine Jeffreys, a clerk in Green Bay, Wis., which is predominantly Democratic, said she had been planning for over a year for that prospect. She and others surveyed said that in early voting so far, they had seen few challenges.
“My concern is that there would be challenges that are not credible that stop up the works and delay voting for everyone else,” Ms. Jeffreys said.
Ms. Patrick, of the National Association of Election Officials, said she welcomed anyone’s interest in monitoring the polls because making elections transparent is essential to trust.
“But I’ve had too many election officials tell me that sometimes these overenthusiastic individuals act like they’re going to find the body, that they’re coming to the crime scene,” she said. What they discover, she said, is that the voting process is mind-numbingly boring — and honestly run.
But it doesn’t take much to create a furor. Scott McDonnell, the clerk for Dane County, Wis., said that a few years ago after a video of poll workers initializing ballots — a standard practice — was misinterpreted as them filling out ballots, it took days to undo the damage caused by the uproar on social media.
“They spend 10 minutes coming up with it and you spend four days debunking it. Then they’re on to the next,” he said.
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