The Republican National Committee (RNC) is actively recruiting and training election officials with the intention of contesting elections in Michigan, recordings obtained by POLITICO have revealed.
The meetings and training sessions have reportedly been occurring since at least the summer of 2021. A PowerPoint obtained by POLITICO includes a slide on training workers on how to challenge voters on their eligibility. The plan also involves creating a network of party friendly lawyers that poll workers can contact through a hotline or website with virtual chat to document their challenges and ask for advice.
“It’s going to be an army,” Matthew Seifried, the RNC election integrity director in Michigan said during an October 5 training session. “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?”
Another slide laid out the stated goal of the training: “Our goal is to recruit, train and place Republican election inspectors in every targeting polling location and absentee count board station in order to make it easy to vote and HARD TO CHEAT.”
For its part, the RNC says they are just trying to create balance in heavily Democratic areas. Only 170 Detroit election officials were Republican out of a total of more than 5,400. Detroit votes overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.
But Janice Winfrey, the Detroit Elections Clerk, says that they reach out to both parties every election and let them know that they are recruiting poll workers and then “get what they get.” In the heavily-Democratic city of Detroit, that means a lot of Democrats.
Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, an election watchdog group that also works to reform campaign finance laws, told POLITICO that the plan is something he has never seen before.
“This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together," he said. "It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.”
Not only is the RNC looking to recruit friendly lawyers, but also district attorneys who could stage real-time challenges to election results. In a separate Zoom meeting recording obtained by POLITICO, Tim Griffin, the legal counsel to The Amistad Project, a group that describes itself as an election-integrity group and was called a partner by Rudy Giuliani in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, says the group is working to build a network of friendly district attorneys who could create a legal “trap” for Winfrey, forcing her to accept their recruits.
“How do we build the proper evidence and how do we build a trap for Janice Winfrey?” Griffin reportedly said in a June 2021 meeting with GOP lawyers.
A local law intended to create bipartisan monitoring of elections requires Winfrey to pick from a list provided to her from both parties. Winfrey says she has already received a list of more than 800 people from the RNC. She says she plans to use a “good number” of them as long as they attend training and are confirmed as registered voters.
Seifried also said that he plans to reach out to local law enforcement with the intention of giving them the tools they need to spot and prevent election fraud.
Previously, the RNC was banned from using what they called “ballot securing” tactics after they were accused of sending off-duty police officers to minority neighborhoods to intimidate voters in the 1980s. Rather than bring the issue to court, the party agreed to a consent decree, barring them from participating in election integrity until that decree expired in 2018.
This year, the RNC is committing $35 million to election integrity efforts.
In an October 2021 training session in Oakland County, Michigan, Seifried said that the party plans to build relationships with lawyers, judges and police chiefs so that when poll workers placed by the RNC are challenged, they will not be thrown out as they were at Detroit’s TCF Center in the 2020 elections.
Penniman is concerned that the network of party-friendly lawyers and district attorneys could be used to disrupt the election, even if no voter fraud is found. If overzealous election officials placed by the RNC challenge enough voters, then it could create a disruption that causes a legal challenge that temporarily stops voting, causing the whole precinct to be invalidated. If that happens enough, then the state legislators may be required to pick the electors themselves.
Seifried also stated that they plan to use the August 2 primary elections in Detroit as a dry run. Chris Thomas, a former election director who served under both Democratic and Republican secretaries of state, said that the practice run will provide a hint if these activities are legitimate attempts to ensure a fair election or a plan to disrupt and suppress the vote.