Will US election observers become election bullies? – News

Republican Tim Waters is among tens of thousands of observers his party is sending to monitor voting in the U.S. presidential election in two weeks. The 63-year-old also believes in Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory that the results could be rigged.

Waters will join other observers in Georgia, one of seven swing states expected to decide the outcome of the close Nov. 5 election between Trump and Kamala Harris.

“I’m very cynical about the situation. I just don’t trust it,” Waters, who chairs his local Republican party, told AFP. “They will try to cheat like in the last elections.”

The Republican Party says its army of observers will “protect” the election. But Waters and many others have bought into Trump’s unprecedented campaign to refuse to accept his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden and his broader attempt to undermine confidence in American democracy.

The fact that so many poll observers will deploy while believing in Trump’s conspiracy theory raises the question of whether they will end up intimidating the process rather than protecting it.

Waters called it “horse manure.”

He redoubled his insistence that in the last presidential election, “the people who intimidated” were the country’s election officials – despite no evidence that significant fraud took place in this huge country.

Certainly election workers – those who run polling places, process registrations and count ballots – are afraid.

About 34 percent of U.S. election workers know of colleagues who left their jobs to vote because of security concerns, according to a survey released in May by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

Incidents reported by the organization include a poll watcher carrying a gun who followed an election worker into a ballot counting location during the 2022 midterm elections in Texas.

A poll worker testified to US lawmakers that she went into hiding after being falsely accused of fraud by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election.

In Georgia’s Peach County — where Waters will monitor the vote — elections supervisor Anthony Sallette said he welcomes transparency but is putting an end to intimidation.

“No matter what, some people are going to get upset about certain things. But as long as they don’t inconvenience voters, that’s OK,” Sallette said.

His employees are prepared to have “a lot of eyes” on them, he added, working in a county that Trump narrowly won with 52% of the vote in 2020.

Asked about concerns about intimidation, Trump campaign adviser Danielle Alvarez told AFP in a statement that the Republican Party was fighting for a “fair and secure process where every legal vote is counted correctly.” .

The rights of poll observers vary by state, but U.S. law generally allows them to observe without violating voter privacy or disrupting the election.

“This year, poll watchers have been encouraged to put their opinions aside and focus on what’s in front of them, not what happened four years ago,” he said. declared.