In light of the chaotic 2020 presidential election, conservative groups across the country have prioritized getting everyday Americans off the sidelines and involved in helping to facilitate the smooth conduction of the 2022 midterms — but, of course, Democrats and their media allies can’t have that.
After mass mail-in (and unsupervised) balloting and hundreds of millions of “Zuckbucks” in government election offices shook many Americans’ confidence in election integrity in 2020, national organizations such as the Republican National Committee (RNC) have been hard at work training grassroots activists to become poll watchers for the 2022 midterms. To date, the RNC has recruited more than 70,000 new poll watchers and workers ahead of Election Day to “help deliver the election transparency that voters deserve.”
Despite the completely legitimate and legal nature of Americans supervising election administration, Democrats masquerading as journalists have cast Republicans’ efforts as a massive voter intimidation campaign by 2020 “election deniers.”
In an article published Wednesday titled, “Extremist groups are going local to disrupt the midterms,” Axios correspondent Jennifer Kingson hyperventilates about groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers signing up to be poll workers and “drop-box watchers” in order to “sway the upcoming midterms in favor of their preferred candidates.” Throughout her diatribe, Kingson tries to make the intimidation of election workers by fringe, right-wing organizations seem like a widespread problem plaguing the entire country, writing that “[e]lection offices are installing bulletproof glass” and “bulking up on security and conducting active-shooter trainings” ahead of the November midterms.
“Rising threats are prompting a shortage of election workers — which extremists could use to their advantage,” she writes.
But Kingson isn’t the only journo espousing such hysteria. In a recently published Time Magazine article titled, “How ‘Stop the Steal’ Became ‘Watch the Polls,’” writer Vera Bergengruen stresses about the “tens of thousands” of Americans who have been recruited to be poll watchers by “right-wing groups” that she says push “false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.” As if she were writing the plot to a bad horror film, Bergendruen warns about “[t]hese newly minted poll watchers motivated by election conspiracies” and their top-secret plan to “observe, record on their phones,” and “let both voters and election workers know that they’re being monitored.”
In other words, she’s worried about conservatives fulfilling the role of your average Election Day poll watcher.
“At best, this is likely to disrupt overburdened election offices. At worst, it could lead to further harassment of election workers and deepening distrust in the country’s democratic systems,” she writes melodramatically.
As laughably alarmist as Kingson and Bergengruen’s hot takes are, their hit pieces on GOP poll watchers are just two of the many articles pushed by left-wing outlets over the past several weeks to push a similar narrative.
“Some Officials Fear Sabotage From Republican Election Workers,” an Oct. 20 Huffington Post headline reads.
“Election officials brace for confrontational poll watchers,” said The Associated Press earlier this month.
The leftists at Reuters went the extra mile and conducted an “exclusive” poll claiming to show that two-fifths of voters are “worried about threats of violence or voter intimidation at polling stations” during the midterms. The publication of the survey is ironic given that in the same write-up of the poll’s findings, Reuters writers Moira Warburton and Jason Lange admit there have been no reports of violence at any ballot drop-off or early-voting location to date.
(For other examples of corporate media hitting the panic button over Republican poll watchers legitimately overseeing the conduction of elections, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Despite the left’s outcry, having poll watchers monitor elections has proven to be crucial. As Federalist Staff Writer Victoria Marshall reported, during the 2020 election, a GOP poll watcher in Georgia found a recount error in DeKalb County that “gave more than 9,000 extra votes to Biden over Trump,” with the batch of ballots in question being “incorrectly labeled as containing 10,707 votes for Biden, when it only contained 1,081 votes for him.”
In Fairfax County, Virginia, a Republican poll watcher “noticed that the Fairfax County Electoral Board was processing absentee and mail-in ballot applications that did not include the last four digits of the applicant’s Social Security Number,” which violated state law.
The goal of the legacy media’s freakout is obvious. In the event that their political allies get annihilated at the ballot box next month, Democrats in the press are setting the stage to pin any and all major election losses on nonexistent voter suppression and intimidation by GOP poll watchers.
While corporate media will undoubtedly keep pumping out attack articles until Election Day, conservatives should prepare to combat the narrative. It’s all part of the left’s crusade to undermine American elections and people’s confidence in the electoral process.