Poll watchers are a pivotal part of elections: Volunteers who observe voting to ensure elections are free and fair by providing transparency and monitoring to make sure all rules and laws are followed. It’s not unusual for political parties or groups to train their own poll watchers to ensure no bad actors are hindering the vote for partisan purposes.

But now, the Tea Party Patriots say they’re training thousands to be poll watchers in battleground states for November’s midterm elections. It’s cause for concern.

• Tea Party Patriots Action is hosting a poll watcher training in Nevada after the Republican convention this week, the group told the Washington Examiner. The group is also training poll watchers in key battleground states like Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Tea Party Patriots already held training sessions in Ohio, Texas, and Georgia.
  
  
• Tea Party Patriots and its founder, Jenny Beth Martin, have a long history of pushing election conspiracy theories — including false claims of mass voter fraud. Martin and her group were one of the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Martin has also been leading the push to get Congress to pass the SAVE America Act and has suggested she had a role in conversations that led to the massive voter suppression bill.
  
  
• Poll watchers are an essential part of elections, but there have been documented instances of far-right poll watchers intimidating voters, harassing election workers, and spreading disinformation to undermine election results.
  
  
• “People across the country, especially with our base, are upset that the SAVE America Act did not get passed into law,” Martin said in an interview with a conservative news outlet. “We’re trying to make sure that people understand, even though that didn’t get passed into law yet, there are other ways we can work to help secure the election.”

➤ Learn about how Republicans weaponize poll watchers

Quote of the week

Failed GOP Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, whose campaign was boosted by weird AI ads, is now against them. 

Last week, Mullin called for a federal probe into the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) — a nonpartisan, pro-voting organization of election administration experts.

Mullin urged the DOJ to investigate CEIR over a years-old research project on states’ efforts to register more voters. CEIR Executive Director David Becker vehemently denied Mullin’s allegations and, in a statement, said he “firmly rejects” the suggestion that his organization did anything wrong. But the call has nonetheless reignited ire and conspiracy theories from election deniers about CEIR and Becker.

• “I’ve been screaming from the rooftops about this guy for 6 years and this organization. Now he is touted as an ‘election expert’ on CNN,” convicted election denier Tina Peters said on social media. “He’s been hiding in the shadows of the Obama and Deep State, State Street cabal for at least as far back as early 2000.”
  
  
• The conservative lawyer and anti-voting activist Cleta Mitchell called Mullin’s push for the DOJ to investigate CEIR “wonderful news.”

Anti-voting activists also seized on the news to attack the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an organization co-founded by Becker that connects election officials from 27 states and Washington, D.C. to share voter registration data to improve the accuracy of each state’s records.

For years, ERIC has been at the center of far-right conspiracies about voter registration after the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing blog, falsely claimed it to be “essentially a left wing voter registration drive all paid for by the States.”

Mullin’s letter alleged that ERIC improperly shared motor vehicle data with CEIR. It also implied that it was done for partisan purposes because CEIR received funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and that the data “regarding potential voters is incredibly valuable to political parties and campaigns.”

• “In other words, citizens’ information was shared and reshared among private organizations—information the letter warns could be extremely valuable to political parties and campaigns,” Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network (EIN) said on social media. EIN tried to call out a “double standard” on states that shared voter registration data but refuse to share their voter rolls with the federal government.
  
  
• But the comparison doesn’t really work: States voluntarily work with ERIC to help clean their voter rolls, while the DOJ is demanding that same data for reasons it has yet to clearly articulate in at least 23 court losses (and at least one full appeals court loss)

➤ Why does Mullin want the DOJ to investigate CEIR?

• Georgia anti-voting activist Kevin Moncla is none too happy with DOJ civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon for failing to crack down on mass voter fraud. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t exist!
  
  
• Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who served as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, doesn’t think Trump’s anti-mail voting order will disenfranchise legal voters. Read the room, Ken.