The Republican National Committee is training a new group of volunteers to monitor voting machines and send possible “evidence” of problems to party lawyers, according to internal materials reported by CNN.
Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams, obtained the training documents and recordings of calls held in July and August with RNC volunteers in Wisconsin and shared them exclusively with CNN. They describe a program of “special monitors” who track voting equipment from pre-election testing through Election Day.
The volunteers are told to write down machine serial numbers, check that each tabulator starts with zero votes and inspect the seals meant to reveal tampering. After polls close, they are supposed to photograph the vote totals and check whether the number of ballots cast matches the number of voters who checked in.
Any concerns go to a new party hotline, which helps RNC attorneys quickly identify possible challenges against state and local election officials.
“Having you all on the ground, notifying us of issues, allows us to take direct action,” an RNC official told volunteers on a July call. “And this leads to real outcomes that benefit Republicans across the state.”
Jenna Banfield, election integrity director for the Wisconsin GOP, told volunteers how to document what they see.
“All these notes that you’re taking, if they are handwritten with timestamps, that’s the gold standard because that’s something we can use as evidence,” Banfield said.
The party also gave volunteers public-records request templates to use if local clerks refuse to turn over logs showing the machines’ chain of custody.
Trainers called the Wisconsin effort during the state’s August primary a pilot that the RNC plans to expand nationally in November. According to the materials, the party’s state teams contributed to more than 175 lawsuits in 2024, and the party is on track to surpass that number this year. The RNC told CNN its election integrity operation is active in 22 states.
Voting rights advocates worry that the RNC operation is built to produce doubt, not to catch fraud. Minor errors or baseless claims picked up by thousands of partisan observers could be amplified and used by Trump and his allies to argue that elections are insecure or rigged.
“A steady stream of machine-centered clips and complaints is designed to leave voters unsure the count can be trusted, which is exactly the ground they need to contest a race they lose,” Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo told CNN.
The program comes as Trump and his allies step up their claims, which lack evidence, that voting machines are vulnerable to fraud. The Justice Department is also preparing to send more than 1,000 federal monitors to polling places on Election Day.
CNN found that several DOJ monitors used in this year’s primaries had helped challenge Trump’s 2020 loss, while another monitor, David Levin, pleaded guilty in 2016 to two misdemeanors for illegally accessing a Florida county elections website.
The RNC and DOJ both said their observers will follow the law. The RNC said its teams have previously flagged real testing errors that were later corrected.
Former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, told CNN that trained observers might cause fewer misunderstandings, but that adding more people, “especially if they have an orientation that the election is being stolen,” could create “some additional narratives.”
The post Leaked docs reveal ominous plan to feed ‘evidence’ to GOP lawyers in post-election blitz appeared first on Raw Story.
