DV Journal

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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Pennsylvanians can be assured that their ballot is safe, secure and accurately counted, no matter the rhetoric repeated by those who seek to undermine public confidence in our elections.

How do I know this? I’ve worked on multiple campaigns of Republicans running for offices from township supervisor to the United State Senate and am intimately familiar with the built-in security features, redundancies and transparencies in our election processes.

For me personally, the most important component of our elections are the individuals who staff them. The people working inside a precinct on Election Day live in the very communities in which they are assisting for more than the 13 hours the polls are open. They are our neighbors. They are our fellow PTA members. We see them at church, the grocery store and other places in our community. And we can trust them.

What’s more is that these individuals receive regular, detailed training about our elections and their responsibilities. These civic-minded Pennsylvanians – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – take their jobs seriously. They know it’s up to them to safeguard the many systems we have in place to make sure votes are cast fairly and counted correctly.

Three of these poll worker positions are elected by the voters in each precinct: the Judge of Elections and the Majority and Minority Inspectors of Election. Should the positions remain unfilled due to a lack of candidates, something that happens with increasing frequency, the responsibility of appointing qualified and trained individuals for these and other necessary roles reverts to the county election boards and officials.

Outside of these posts, the people who work our elections are everyday Pennsylvanians, and many of them have been giving their time as service to their community for a long time. They receive detailed training about each part of the process, gain valuable experience, help their communities and even get paid for their work and for attending training.

Our poll workers are the backbone of a system that protects your vote. This system of checks and balances includes things like public inspections of voting machines, regular election equipment testing, confirming voter eligibility when casting ballots and multiple redundancies to ensure the results are accurate and reflect the voice of Pennsylvanians.

Our election laws and systems also allow Pennsylvanians, regardless of their party affiliation, to observe virtually every step in the process, ensuring transparency. Anyone can witness it by signing up to be a poll worker in their neighborhood.

If you have questions or concerns about our election processes, step up and volunteer to work inside a precinct on Election Day. You’ll find what those of us who are intimately familiar with our election processes already know – our elections are secure and the results reflect the will of the voters.

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Pennsylvania’s failure to enact a key component of election integrity has put it behind not only a vast majority of states and most developed countries but behind many developing nations as well.

The lack of a voter ID requirement in our commonwealth is even more frustrating because an overwhelming number of citizens polled have voiced support for this commonsense measure.

The Pennsylvania Senate recently acted to remedy this embarrassing situation by passing a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow voters to finally decide the issue themselves. Implementing these voter verification standards will help weed out any bad actors and ensure legality. Legitimate votes are the only votes that are counted.

Election security is not a one-party issue. Many claims have been filed in courts by both Democrats and Republicans throughout the years, questioning the validity of voters. The goal of this is to erase those concerns.

Every excuse used to block this rational election reform has been shown to be false. Requiring proof of identification before voting does not suppress turnout, and acceptable IDs are not difficult to obtain.

Opponents of voter verification proposals have made false claims that the legislation would reduce voter turnout and have a disproportionate impact on African American and other minority voters.

This is strictly not true. In some cases, the opposite has been true.

For instance, when photo ID was added as a requirement in Georgia, overall turnout and African American turnout went up, not down. Academic studies and large surveys conducted of non-voters by both liberal and conservative entities consistently show voter ID laws don’t keep people from voting regardless of their age, sex, race, income, and education.

Most developed countries, and many developing ones, have voter photo ID requirements. They also have higher voter turnout than the United States.

Voter ID requirements are the norm around the world. All 27 European Union countries require photo identification for voting. Mexico and Columbia require government-issued biometric IDs to vote.

Canada requires voter ID, which must be a driver’s license or any other card issued by a Canadian government with photo, name, and current address. If the individual doesn’t have one of those, the voter must present at the polls at least two pieces of ID with his or her name and at least one current address, such as a birth certificate and a residential lease.

IDs are not difficult to obtain. Voters have 15 ID options approved by the Pennsylvania Department of State. Any individual who does not possess a valid form of ID could receive one at no cost to ensure no voter is prevented from participating in the election process.

Nationally, the calls for voter ID come from Democrats and Republicans alike. The 2005 Bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, recommended voter identification in its final report.

Former President Carter said requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls was just as “practical” as the many other ID requirements of daily life. “Americans have to remember you have to have the equivalent to what we’re requiring to cast a ballot to cash a check or board a plane,” he noted.

A Franklin and Marshall College poll found that 74 percent of Pennsylvanians support requiring voters to present identification to vote. A Monmouth University poll found that 80 percent of Americans favor voter ID nationwide.

If voter ID is not a barrier to voting and the people want it, why does Pennsylvania remain so out of step on this issue? The first obstacle was former Gov. Tom Wolf. The General Assembly passed a voter ID requirement in 2021, but the governor vetoed it.

Unwilling to let the voice of the people fall on deaf ears, lawmakers in the previous legislative session passed a proposed constitutional amendment that would bypass the governor and send the question straight to the voters as a ballot question.

Constitutional amendments must be passed in two consecutive legislative sessions before they can go before the voters. The Senate did so this month, sending the measure to the House of Representatives, which also needs to pass the proposal in order to have the question placed on the ballot.

Voting is a cherished right. Confidence in our elections is vital to holding our good and decent republic together. Unfortunately, polls in recent years indicate that more than half of voters in Pennsylvania question the outcome of elections. This cannot go unaddressed.

The House of Representatives should pass voter ID legislation immediately and let the voters decide in this year’s primary election.

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