The Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) is training thousands of volunteer attorneys to monitor the November election in key battleground states, with training sessions this month for Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
“We’re kind of like the National Guard that deploys the troops and somebody else commands them,” says RNLA President Michael Thielen.
The Trump campaign, he says, is in charge of the lawyers who will be on the ground in Pennsylvania and the other battlegrounds.
Their job won’t be easy.
“Sometimes it’s hard to see where the incompetence ends and the fraud begins,” says Thielen, pointing to cases from the 2020 election where masks were not required to vote but some election officials refused to admit people to vote if they weren’t wearing a mask in school buildings, for instance.
The Trump campaign’s election integrity program, which is being run by the Republican National Committee, is still in its infancy.
Due to a legal injunction, the national party couldn’t undertake election integrity efforts before 2018. The 2020 election was the first year it had the green light to do it.
But 2024 will be a completely different scale.
In April, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced they would have 100,000 election monitors on the ground in key states during the 2024 election, including thousands of lawyers ready to respond quickly to irregularities and violations of state election laws.
They called it “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history,” saying it would include monitoring the testing of voting machines (logic and accuracy testing), early voting, Election Day voting, mail ballot processing, and post-election activity, including the canvas of votes conducted by county officials before certification, and also any audits and recounts.
The focus of the program is on battleground states, with 18 states included on its website, protecthevote.com.
“Attorneys will be stationed at every single target processing center where mail ballots are tabulated,” the RNC promised.
The Republican National Lawyers Association has taken on the training of attorneys, who need to learn the election laws of the states where they’ll be deployed.
Pennsylvania is increasingly a focus of both the Trump and Harris campaigns. The Real Clear Politics average of polls shows it’s virtually a dead heat, with Donald Trump leading by about half a percent.
This year, Thielen says the ballot security situation in Pennsylvania will be very different from 2020.
In that election, Republican observers were locked out of central count facilities and if allowed to observe, frequently kept at such a distance that they were not able to see ballots that were being opened and processed. The Trump campaign alleged nearly 700,000 mail-in ballots in the two most populous counties – Allegheny and Philadelphia – were “not observed by any single Republican.”
This year, Thielen said, Philadelphia allowed observers to oversee the April primary election and the mail ballot counting. He added election laws have also been tightened.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled there must be a date on the outside of ballot envelopes and if there’s no date, the ballots cannot be counted. The court also affirmed that ballots must be received by county election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Both mark a major change from 2020, when ballots were counted if they were sent after the election had already taken place, and were counted even if the envelopes weren’t dated.
“Compared to what it was in 2020, it’s infinitely better,” said Thielen.
But it remains to be seen how effective Republican attorneys will be on the ground in places like Philadelphia, where Democrats outnumber Republicans six-to-one and there are few if any Republican election workers at many precincts.
“If you have somebody of some authority and credibility to call people out, you can usually affect what happens,” says Jim Bopp, a prominent election lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign in 2020. “This has been a tried-and-true method, to deploy lawyers in these situations.”
Thielen says he does not expect Republican observers will have the same difficulties observing the election that they had in 2020 and that things will be much more transparent this year.
“Remember, the pandemic gave them the ultimate hook,” he says.
As of Wednesday, Oct. 16, 1,729,695 mail ballots had been requested in Pennsylvania: 1,024,284 by Democrats, 498,926 by Republicans and 206,485 by all others.
Mail ballots in Pennsylvania can be opened starting at 7 a.m. on Election Day.
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