How the ‘Army for Trump’ Is Already Turning Polling Places into a Battleground

With President Donald Trump urging “an army for Trump” to descend upon election sites on November 3, the United States faces its most perilous election since the Civil War.

Polling places face a heightened threat of being swarmed by Trump’s self-appointed election observers, who may have little familiarity or concern with rules designed to protect voters and poll workers from harassment and intimidation.

U.S. polling sites are likely to be a battleground. That’s where Trump, his high-level Republican allies and followers alike, want to challenge and suppress votes cast by Democratic-leaning constituencies like Black people, Latinx folks, the elderly, and students. 

Much attention has been  devoted to the prospect of post-election chaos, as Trump incessantly asserts that—despite enormous evidence to the contrary—mail-in ballots are somehow a massive source of cheating. Trump even tried justifying cutbacks in USPS funding to block mail-in voting. 

Essentially, Trump believes that any outcome (other than a victory for him) is prima facie proof that he and his supporters have been robbed. “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” Trump has pronounced. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

Both Trump and Pence, meanwhile, have refused during their debates to commit themselves to accepting “a peaceful transition of power.” It would seem that groundless claims of fraud have become central to the Trump strategy.

During his debate with Democratic rival Joe Biden, Trump signaled to  white-supremacist militia groups like the Proud Boys that they should “stand back and stand by.” The President later issued an unconvincing, anodyne denunciation of white supremacy, but the Proud Boys saw “stand by” as a signal of approval and began selling merchandise based on Trump’s quote.  

Before we even get to processing the election results and the ensuing post-election turmoil, we can expect widespread and potentially violent conflict focused at polling sites on November 3. In its annual threat assessment, issued on October 6, the Department of Homeland Security stated that polling places are shaping up as “likely flashpoints for potential violence.” 

Trump, for his part, is doing everything he can to encourage this. “Watch those ballots!” he’s ominously warned. “I am encouraging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that’s what has to happen—I am urging them to do it.”

Polling places, as a result, face a heightened threat of being swarmed by Trump’s self-appointed election observers, who may have little familiarity or concern with rules designed to protect voters and poll workers from harassment and intimidation. (In fact, Facebook chose to take down posts recruiting poll watchers if they contained “militarized” language).

State and federal laws have long existed to protect voters from being subjected to threatening conduct and last-minute political haranguing at the roughly 100,000 polling places across the United States. 

Under state laws, poll watchers are often legally restricted on where they may stand, whom they may speak with, and which documents they can examine. They are often also required to acquire certification or wear a badge. Some states have established “buffer zones” in which no “electioneering” may take place, such as 100 feet away from the entrance to polling sites in Wisconsin.

But even before Trump’s exhortations, the Republican Party was already planning a $20 million initiative to monitor voting and voters at the polls, along with legal actions to make voting rules more restrictive. The aim of the GOP lawsuits is to make voting as difficult as possible, with mail-in ballots a key target. That’s because a larger share of Democrats are expected to vote by mail, due in part to concerns about the runaway spread of a virus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans. 

Trump campaign chief counsel Justin Clark expressed the intensity of the GOP’s determination to take on “voter fraud” despite its barely measurable scale. “Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020,” Clark told GOP leaders in Wisconsin. “It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

Attorney General William Barr, shameless in his fealty to Trump, broke Justice Department precedent against late election-year actions by announcing investigations of “voter fraud.” Barr also echoed Trump’s baseless charges that mail-in ballots were potentially a source of fraudulent voting on a massive scale.

The issues in the Trump campaign lawsuits are mundane-sounding, but with enormous implications in a close election like that of 2016, when just 77,000 votes distributed across three crucial industrial states determined the decisive electoral-vote outcome. 

Among the issues being litigated this year in numerous states, as National Public Radio recounted: “Must a ballot be received by or just postmarked by Election Day? Can states require a witness for a mail-in ballot? What standards are being used to judge a voter’s signature? Can drop boxes be used to return ballots instead of relying on the U.S. Postal Service?”

More than 250 pandemic-related voting lawsuits had been filed by September 22, according to Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School. With the lifting of a consent decree prevailing from 1982 to 2018, the Republican Party’s polling-place activity had been severely limited because of its tactics of intimidation and harassment, it seems like there are no limits to what the Republicans will do to exclude unwelcome sectors from the democratic process.

We have already seen in-person intimidation at an early-voting center in Fairfax, Virginia, last month. Trump supporters carrying banners formed a kind of picket line outside the center and drove around the parking lot with their signs and banners, leaving both voters and poll workers feeling intimidated. 

In Fairfax, local officials are seeking to expand the buffer zone outside polling places from forty to 150 feet. But the actions like the intimidating display in Fairfax remain legal so long as it occurs outside of the buffer zone.

Worse, there are even more worrying possibilities about armed intimidation using a twisted definition of the Second Amendment. There has been a proliferation of “open carry” gun laws across the nation without regard to the impact on public life. Thanks to tenacious efforts by Republican legislators, military-style weapons are now permitted in most public settings. 

These weapons, in the hands of militia members and others, have appeared at anti-mask demonstrations outside and inside of state capitol buildings in Michigan and Wisconsin (concealed guns are also legal in Wisconsin’s state capitol). 

In five of the most important swing states in the 2020 election, it is legal to bring guns into polling sites in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, as the Coalition to Stop Gun violence and Guns Down America have reported.

While local governments in North Carolina and Virginia have broad powers to impose bans on bringing guns to polling places, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have enacted state laws that preempt such local laws from prohibiting firearms. Wisconsin’s Election Commission is currently evaluating policies on this issue, information officer Reid Mangey told The Progressive.

The new wrinkles in voter suppression and intimidation are distinctly Trumpian. 

Yet these new elements are piled on top of a vast structure of voter suppression: Voter ID laws, gerrymandering, the closing of polling places mostly in minority areas (1,688 from 2013 to 2019), large-scale voter purges, the denial of voting rights to ex-felons, and onerous registration requirements that were unfolding long before Trump.

Besides dethroning Trump, tearing down the entire architecture aimed at suppressing votes and attacking democracy remains urgently needed.

But right now, the mainstream Republican Party has become not only far-right in the ideology it preaches, but it is also openly contemptuous of the most fundamental pillars of democracy in its practice.