Voter suppression has a long and ugly history in this country. Many groups of people– particularly Black people, the elderly, students and people with disabilities– have faced voter suppression in elections. Voter suppression can occur in a few different ways. In the past laws have been enacted to suppress votes. Poll taxes have been put in place to add a financial hindrance to voting. Voter registration records have been purged to unregister people from voting. Some people even believe that the current process of registering to vote is itself an act of voter suppression in some states.
One of the simplest forms of voter suppression is something that President Trump and the Republican Party are urging their supporters to take part in: poll watching.
Poll watching, by definition, is not inherently bad. Poll watching is when people– usually a volunteer for or hired by a political party– keep an eye on the process of the election. The laws differ state-by-state, but usually poll watchers don’t have much authority outside of standing at the precinct and watching. Poll watchers are there to make sure that nothing “shady” happens, and usually party politics are heavily at play.
The issue is poll watchers don’t really do anything that the poll workers aren’t already doing, and historically, poll watchers have been used as a form of voter intimidation and suppression. This sort of vigilantism is pointless, when the poll workers are already there to make sure nothing goes wrong and all votes are counted.
If the concern is that the poll workers will attempt to interfere with the election, those fears can be dismantled by learning about poll worker training and the Election Day process. At every precinct, half of the poll workers are republicans and half are democrats, and a republican and democrat must be paired up at each table, and one member from both parties must sign off on or be a part of every process at the precincts on Election Day.
The Trump Campaign is calling for poll watchers to be at every single precinct in the country. In a video on Trump’s campaign site, Erin Perrine of Trump’s Election Day Team calls on his supporters to join the Army for Trump and fight for a “fair and honest election.”
“We all know that the democrats will be up to their old dirty tricks on Election Day to make sure that President Trump doesn’t win,” Perrine says in the video. What that means exactly is unclear, as that is all she says on the topic. There is an insurmountable amount of evidence that voter fraud is not a threat to the legitimacy of this election, yet Trump’s campaign continues to stoke this fear by pushing for poll watchers.
It’s obvious, through the way Trump has been speaking about the election and through this “Army for Trump” that Trump is afraid he is going to lose this election and feels the need to employ intimidation tactics to help his odds of winning this election. Poll watchers are simply a form of voter suppression, and if it doesn’t scare you that Trump’s campaign plans on having them at every single voting precinct in America, it should.
Mikayla Rochelle is a senior studying strategic communication at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. What are your thoughts? Tell Mikayla by tweeting her at @mikayla_roch.
