Trump and the RNC say they will recruit 100,000 poll watchers. Experts are skeptical

Republicans say they will mobilize more than 100,000 people in battleground states to ensure “transparency and fairness” in the 2024 election, an announcement criticized by some as risking potential voter intimidation.

“Whenever a ballot is being cast or counted, Republican poll watchers will be observing the process and reporting any irregularity,” the Republican National Committee announced Friday in conjunction with former President Donald Trump’s campaign. “In the event of an irregularity or problem, RNC lawyers and the volunteer attorneys that they have coordinated will provide rapid response services to resolve the issue using a sophisticated, tested action protocol."

The announcement accused Democrats of using “tricks” in 2020 but did not say what those tricks were. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, but Trump and many of his Republican supporters have falsely alleged his loss was the result of illegal manipulation.

Recruiting poll watchers can be 'real hard'

One Democratic expert was skeptical that Republicans would be able to muster such a lofty number of volunteer poll watchers.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said there’s no way they will find 100,000 volunteers, and they might as well have announced 10 million. He said he ran an initiative mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, but, “It’s hard,” he said. “It’s real hard.”

Trump has previously called for volunteers to monitor elections. His 2016 campaign website asked for volunteers to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”

Levitt said there’s mundane work for volunteers at the polls to do, like help people register to vote or get a ballot in the language they speak, but that’s not what the RNC is advertising.

“If your job is to stand there and watch for fraud that doesn’t happen, it’s really hard to recruit people for that job, because then the job is — stand for 15 hours," Levitt said.

Obama famously recruited and mobilized millions of volunteers during his 2008 campaign. Adav Noti, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, called that a "different kind of volunteering" that involved phone banking and door-knocking.

"Most poll watchers are operating on a local level," Noti said. "It does not work to try to recruit poll watchers to go to some precinct halfway across the country and sit there for 12 hours while nothing happens and watch people cast their votes."

RNC says there are five parts to its plan

The RNC’s announcement said its volunteers would observe in five key areas: “logic and accuracy machine testing,” early voting, Election Day voting, mail ballot processing, and post-election activity such as canvass, audits and recounts. The party also said each battleground would have an “election integrity hotline.” The party did not say which specific states or provide numbers for those hotlines.

There is no evidence that voting machines altered the 2020 election, but false statements that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were rigged to alter the 2020 election led to Fox News paying $787 million to the company to settle a defamation lawsuit. People who inaccurately question the results of the 2020 election have also targeted absentee ballots, but there is no evidence that wrongfully submitted or erroneous absentee ballots flipped the election.

“Every ballot. Every precinct. Every processing center. Every county. Every battleground state. We will be there,” RNC co-chair Lara Trump, who is married to Donald Trump's son Eric, said in the announcement. "The RNC is hiring hundreds of election integrity staff across the map – more than ever before because our Party will be recruiting thousands of more observers to protect the vote in 2024. These campaign officials in states are tasked with recruiting, training, and when possible, shifting poll watchers and poll workers day in and day out."

Levitt said the biggest risk to the RNC's program announcement is if some voters hear about a potential massive presence of Republican poll watchers and − fearing confrontation with someone challenging their eligibility − decide it would be too much of a hassle for them to vote. But he said those infrequent voters, are voting Republican more and more, so it could come back to bite them.

A poll in February and March found that the more elections people voted in since 2018, the more likely they were to support President Joe Biden, and the fewer elections people had voted in, the more likely they were to support Trump.

“I think that the RNC doesn’t realize that those are their voters now,” Levitt said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump, Republican Party aim to mobilize 100,000 poll watchers