With the presidential election seven months away, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Trump campaign announced a new initiative last week to deploy over 100,000 election integrity volunteers in battleground states in order to “ensur[e] transparency and fairness in the 2024 elections.”
Characterizing the new program as the “most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history,” the RNC calls for poll watchers and workers to work in tandem with a team of attorneys, who will be stationed at processing centers that tabulate mail-in ballots. The attorneys will man hotlines that will field all questions and issues reported by poll watchers and voters.
“I think mail-in ballots certainly are a big concern as far as the chain of custody and keeping track of them,” said Christina Bobb, senior counsel for Election Integrity at the RNC, on Monday’s edition of “Washington Watch.” “The biggest concern is just making sure that people on the ground, people in these communities are involved, [are] paying attention, [and] know what’s going on in [their] counties. … We can have a secure election.”
Bobb went on to argue that despite Democrats’ rhetoric about being concerned about secure and fair elections, recent incidents have called this commitment into question.
“We saw Republicans kicked out [of ballot tabulation centers],” she highlighted. “We saw pizza boxes and cardboard boxes being put up on the windows so people couldn’t see into what was going on. Recently, we had to file two complaints with the Wisconsin Election Commission due to Madison and Milwaukee not hiring enough Republican workers, even though the Republican Party had submitted more than 250 names of people who had confirmed that they were willing to work the election, and they called less than 50 of them in order to actually be part of the process. … We need representation from both sides, but the problem that we have seen is that they’ve been excluding Republicans in a lot of these key places.”
Bobb further contended that one of the key ways to ensure a secure election is to make ballot tabulation decentralized.
“[W]hen you have different precincts doing the counting, that is a level of security because it’s decentralized,” she explained. “But when we see these big voting centers where everything is centralized counting, that’s where it becomes a lot murkier, and it’s harder to see because you have a couple people doing counting in a back room that count for the entire county. … So it’s these big centralized county facilities like we saw in 2020 at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County and in Milwaukee and in Philadelphia and in Detroit (the TCF Center), [these places are] where we had the biggest concerns.”
Bobb concluded by expressing hope that the RNC initiative will help boost voter confidence and encouraged voters to get involved in election integrity efforts in their local communities.
“If you have concerns and are worried about it, the best thing you can do is to get involved in the process,” she emphasized. “I’m fortunate to work with people across the country, a lot of grassroots efforts, and I can tell you the people that are involved and engaged on the ground are not discouraged. They’re very encouraged by the amount of enthusiasm and people involved that are concerned about this and working to protect their local elections. So if you’re one of these folks that say, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can trust my vote, I don’t know if I should vote.’ Get involved. You’re exactly the kind of person that we need to get involved in the process to be part of the solution, and it will encourage you because courage is contagious.”
Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.
