Skip to content Skip to footer

Leaked Tapes Reveal GOP’s Plan to Train Right-Wing Operatives to Be Poll Workers

The plan would create a network of poll workers and attorneys working behind the scenes to overturn elections.

Election workers open ballots in preparation for scanning at the Dekalb County Voter Registration and Elections Office in Decatur, Georgia, on Monday, November 2, 2020.

The Republican Party is hatching a plan to infiltrate polling places using GOP-trained operatives and to create an “army” of right-wing lawyers in order to make it easier for the party to challenge and overturn election results, newly leaked video recordings reveal.

According to an outline of the plan by a Michigan-based Republican National Committee (RNC) staffer, the party is hoping to create an online database to help build a network of Republican-friendly lawyers and poll workers that can work in tandem to challenge election results at polling places in Democratic-majority locations, Politico reports. By installing trained GOP operatives as poll workers, the party can get more access to ballots and power to overturn elections, party members say.

“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” Michigan RNC election director Matthew Seifried said in a recorded meeting with GOP activists last November. Ensuring that GOP operatives take on roles as official poll workers is key to the plan, he said.

The party has been crafting this plan for months, according to Politico, which obtained tapes recorded between the summer of 2021 and May of this year. An RNC spokesperson told the publication that the goal is to “even [the] playing field” in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas — all while the Republican Party works to erode voting rights and potentially overturn election results entirely.

The plan is an extension of the party’s goal of biasing elections toward Republicans after Donald Trump lied about the 2020 presidential election being affected by widespread voter fraud — even as Republican voters move on from the 2020 election. If successful, it would operate at a less visible and less transparent level than moves like voter suppression bills, which state legislators have been passing en masse.

In order to win those legal battles, party operatives say, Republicans will have to amass a huge number of sympathetic lawyers. “It’s going to be an army” of lawyers to back up the poll workers, Seifried said at a training session in October, appearing to acknowledge that the party will have to go through extralegal or otherwise legally intricate means to obtain the results Republicans want. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

Most states have requirements for the partisan makeup of poll workers to be balanced in hopes of protecting elections from bias. But Republicans have been attacking elections at every level, working to pass legislation to bias election officials toward the right while waging loud and violent attacks on poll workers. This could have a chilling effect on Democratic poll workers’ ability to help run elections — indeed, in some places, it has already led to the ousting of Democratic election officials.

If the party successfully recruits poll workers to contest votes, and those contests work, it could essentially lead to bottom-up local coups at a scale that may be difficult for Democrats to combat.

Republicans have already reached their recruiting goal for the plan, with over 5,600 people having signed up to be poll workers since the winter. Sefried has submitted 850 of these people to Detroit election officials. Conservative activists have also been holding trainings in multiple states, meeting with activists in hopes of compiling a list of district attorneys who would be sympathetic to Republican election challenges.

“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” said Tim Griffin, legal counsel to the Amistad Project, which Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once identified as a “partner” to Trump’s lawsuits over the 2020 election, in a training. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.”

Republicans have also been using other covert strategies to win votes. As the American Prospect reports, the RNC has been setting up local centers aimed at swaying poor and non-white voters — groups that the Democratic Party establishment often take for granted — toward Republicans, even as politicians in the party embrace violent white supremacist ideologies.

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy