Tedesco attended the training and said its main goal was to “be the eyes and ears” of the survey monitors’ work. He summed up what officers told attendees: “Stay within the law” and “don’t be a coward,” but “if you spot something that seems out of line, say something.”
Others shared concerns about the specifics of the vote and were pleased that the national and state parties chose the midwestern battleground of Michigan as the venue to launch the public effort, even if the exercise did not go into detail. .
“Michigan has a lot of mail-in ballots,” said Teresa Snider, a 60-year-old mortgage collector from Oakland County. “If you want to vote, you have to be there and you have to do it,” he said, adding that mail-in ballots are acceptable for the disabled and senior citizens, but “in general, they’re very problematic.”
The Michigan incident was billed as the official start of the party’s more concrete plans to recruit volunteers and even train them in poll-monitoring practices. The RNC has scheduled similar events next week in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and the following week in Georgia. Additional fights are planned in the coming weeks in other battleground states, including Wisconsin, officials said.
Biden Won Michigan in 2020 2.8 percentage points, and Trump won Only 0.2 in 2016 percentage point — less than 11,000 votes. The competition is expected to be intense this year as well.
In recent months, the RNC has focused more broadly on election integrity. Since Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in March, the party has filed a series of lawsuits alleging that voter rolls were inflated in some states. The RNC also worked with election lawyers before announcing its intention in April deploy an army of supporters Election Day in November to “protect votes and secure a big win.”
However, Democrats with experience working closely with voter protection efforts They claimed the RNC was exaggerating examined their work and said they were skeptical that Republicans could hire so many people to monitor elections because of fraud.