Consider the tens of millions of Americans descending upon their polling places, this blood-begotten rite and right, now thought by half the country’s citizens to be bullshit. “Eighty-two percent of the country understands that [2020] was a rigged election,” Donald Trump said at a rally this past spring. The number is far less, and Trump bears considerable responsibility for making voters doubt the veracity of the 2020 contest (a view held by roughly a third of the electorate), but the net effect is that, on the eve of the 2024 election, only 37 percent of Americans believe the coming contest will be both “honest and open,” while a near majority feel that the elections will either be “Honest but Not Open” or “Open but Not Honest” or, worst of all worlds, “Neither Honest nor Open.”
The legal and institutional safeguards of the election and voting process have themselves become the source of many voters’ doubts and confusions, as well as many candidates’ conspiratorial claims. According to one recent survey, roughly half of Republicans and a third of independents distrust voting by mail and are worried about people casting illegal votes; Democrats, meanwhile, mostly trust the voting process, but are worried about laws and intimidation tactics that might dissuade legal voters from participating in the election, or might otherwise discount legitimate ballots. The number of voters concerned about fraud is 58 percent. The situation has emerged, then, that the process of voting in America, from early voting to the final tally, is as contested as the elections themselves. Trust in the government, unsurprisingly, sits near its half-century low.
Consider, then, once more, these tens of millions of distrusting Americans, arriving to their polling places to find that the institution protecting our free and fair elections is in a spiral of deepening distrust, the voting process seeming as corrupted as the government itself. Nor do they trust much the temp workers employed for every election by every state, or the companies subcontracted to collect and count the ballots; employees have their biases and computers can be hacked and ballot boxes stuffed and identities stolen and mail-in votes altered and there is not a single institution in sight that inspires much confidence, but especially for those voters already feeling anxious about our elections.
Enter, then, the poll watcher, tasked with observing the fairness of these elections, and of offering a modicum of authority to the angst-ridden electorate. The poll watcher, a figure whose rules are determined by every state’s Board of Elections, is typically appointed by candidates, political parties, independent organizations, and/or political committees—which is to say that these semi-official figures (some wear badges) can be anyone at all. In my hometown of New York City, the position of poll watcher is described thus:
The role of the Poll Watcher is to observe elections at the polling sites on behalf of a particular candidate, political party or organization and where they observe irregularities, report these observations to the Elections Inspector, the Police Officer and/or the Board of Elections.
The purview given to these individuals, meanwhile, is substantial:
The portion of the poll site containing the table used by election inspectors and Board of Elections equipment, including the Privacy Booths, Ballot Marking Device (BMD), and Scanners, used to conduct such elections and any areas used by voters within the poll site to move between such locations.
The poll watcher is legally allowed to do a host of things—her “watching” powers are expansive—including: “arrive at 5:00 AM before the unlocking and examination of any voting machine to verify no votes have been cast and that the Ballot Boxes and Ballot Bin Liner Case are empty”; “Examine poll books as long as they don’t interfere with inspectors or election proceedings”; “Observe the closing of the polls and the canvass”; “Challenge individual voters on the basis of: Signature authenticity, Residence, Multiple voting, Qualification to vote, Electioneering.” Poll watchers will make such a challenge “with the Election Inspectors, who will make a ruling on the challenge in accordance with approved procedures.” Beyond their role on Election Day, poll watchers can relay their “observations” to party lawyers or the media. While in some cases poll watchers have certification or relationships with local governments (and many will take little comfort in that), usually they do not.
It is not hard to anticipate the problems—partisan poll watchers being tasked with “watching” the voting process, and being empowered to challenge individual voters according to a range of loosely defined categories. These appointments are not well regulated, nor carefully monitored. It seems fair, on the one hand, to allow the public some oversight of the voting process, but given the history of voting in America, it also seems insane.
Poll watching was born in the nineteenth century, largely to respond to a voting process that took place in public and was rife with intimidation and abuse. “Everyone could see who you were voting for, what ballot you cast,” explains Gideon Cohn-Postar in a recently released PBS report. “And in that environment, the polls became a really raucous place. Violence and intimidation at the polls ranged from verbal threats to outright gunplay, stabbings.” Sometimes, though, poll watching was deployed precisely to threaten and intimidate: in 1981, the Republican National Committee (RNC) in New Jersey launched a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” a group that included local off-duty cops brandishing handguns and wearing armbands in voting areas where they posted signs, in scary capital letters, “WARNING: THIS AREA IS BEING PATROLLED BY THE NATIONAL BALLOT SECURITY TASK FORCE IT IS A CRIME TO FALSIFY A BALLOT OR TO VIOLATE ELECTION LAWS.” A lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee was resolved when the RNC entered into a consent decree that barred the Republican Party “from engaging in activities that suppress the vote, particularly when it comes to minority voters.” The decree required the GOP to “allow a federal court to review proposed ‘ballot security’ programs.” This requirement went into effect in 1982 and expired in 2017, which was, according to a senior lieutenant with Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal.” For the 2020 election, the RNC announced its plan to recruit fifty thousand poll watchers to cover voting sites around the country.
The fifty thousand Republican poll watchers never materialized, but Republicans have been mobilizing more and more poll watchers with each cycle. For 2024, the RNC’s “Election Integrity Program” is hoping to recruit 100,000 volunteers to serve as poll watchers. “Groups backing former President Donald J. Trump recently sent messages to organize poll watchers to be ready to dispute votes in Democratic areas,” The New York Times noted today, on election eve. Many of the posts “reviewed by The Times urged followers to be prepared for violence.”
The 2022 mid-term elections, meanwhile, might offer a preview of what’s to come. In Arizona, according to Time, “one of the poll watchers complained loudly about ‘fraudulent elections.’ Another had to be reprimanded multiple times about trying to view private voter data. A third often showed up to take photographs of election administrators ….” In Raleigh, a poll worker had to intervene when a poll watcher blocked a voter’s access to the voting machine. “You need to back off!” a poll worker shouted. “We had tons of complaints that poll watchers were intrusive,” a Texas official testified in 2023, “and voters felt intimidated because the poll watcher would come and stand behind them as they are voting …. It was disturbing.”
Into the chaos of our contested elections strides the poll chaplain—religious leaders who hope to inspire a sense of calm and gravitas in the voting process, and to de-escalate issues should they arise. While there are many clergy members organizing around this year’s election, the largest appears to be the coalition created by Sojourners and Faiths United to Save Democracy, which trains and then sends clergy (pastors, rabbis, imams, etc.) to swing state polling sites on Election Day. Like other poll watchers, the poll chaplain is primarily there to observe, but is also ready to offer some moral guidance. A poll chaplain training I attended included a crash course on conflict management techniques.
As Black enfranchisement has always been a site of reactionary and racist opposition, and as Black religious leaders have been central in expanding voting access since at least the Civil Rights era, it was unsurprisingly members of the Black church who first mobilized religious leaders to watch the polls. A 1968 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted: “In areas where Negro election officials have not been appointed, or where Negroes appointed to serve as election officials identified with the white community, poll watchers are considered to be the only resource through which Negro candidates can monitor the election process to deter irregularities and to identify instances of racial discrimination and vote fraud.” Many of today’s poll chaplains thus see themselves as part of a lineage dating back to the Civil Rights era.
But after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which eliminated provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required state governments to seek federal preclearence when passing election laws, concerns emerged about the potential for lawmakers to make voting more difficult for minorities—especially in state’s with long traditions of doing so. “Holder v. Shelby County essentially weakened or gutted one major part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Rev. Adam Taylor, Sojourners’ president, told me. Taylor has been at the center of efforts to recruit and train poll chaplains. “We were alarmed that [Holder v. Shelby] was going to open up the floodgates for states in the South, but also in other parts of the country, to try to put in place new restrictions, new barriers to voting, particularly directed at Black and brown communities. And lo and behold, that is what we’ve seen since that decision was made.”
Since 2013, Taylor and his partners have sought to expand the scope and scale of their mission. “We needed to kind of rebuild the multiracial, multi-faith coalition that drove the Civil Rights movement that helped pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the first place,” Taylor said. He feels this is even more true after the 2020 election. “I think it’s really important to emphasize the degree to which the 2020 election and the big lie promulgated by former President Trump and his allies has sown an incredible degree of distrust in our electoral system. And, you know, I think that that was preventable. That has been a tragic outcome, and something that we’re gonna have to continue to repair over time.”
This was a perspective shared by Rev. Beth Patton, as well. Patton is the statewide poll chaplain organizer for Wisconsin Interfaith Voter Engagement Campaign (WIVEC), which has mobilized seventy clergy members to volunteer in this year’s election. Unlike some other similar initiatives to mobilize poll watchers or poll chaplains—especially those with a national scope—the training for WIVEC volunteers is substantial, and is rooted in a careful understanding of Wisconsin’s election laws.
Patton’s efforts are grounded in a deep sense of civic engagement—something she inherited from her father, also a Presbyterian minister, who had served as a poll chief when she was a child. “It’s not my role to tell you who to vote for or what you should think,” she said when we spoke, “but to encourage folks to be civically engaged, to understand or follow what’s happening in our neighborhoods, in our country and the world. Because as people of faith, we’re called to care for and love our neighbors, and our neighbors are next door and our neighbors are across the ocean.”
Notably, the kind of civically minded work Patton and her father felt called to do has drastically changed in meaning over the span of a single generation. “I don’t remember any sense of fear or concern over safety,” she recalls of her father’s work as a poll chief. “The climate has definitely changed now, with folks feeling more thoughtful about their safety in terms of what should just be a natural thing that we do in our country to go vote—vote for whoever.”
The efforts to organize clergy into poll chaplains—grounded in a history of Black and minority disenfranchisement and voter repression, in the moral authority of religious clergy, in interfaith activism to advance civil rights, in the national value of free and fair elections, in practices of de-escalation and conflict resolution—strike me as both necessary and worrisome. Necessary because there is a real and systematic effort underway to suppress the vote via gerrymandering, unnecessary (or even unlawful) limits on mail-in voting, rules about providing water to those waiting on long lines to vote (some of which are also unlawful), and so on. These restrictions disproportionately impact minority voters. Worrisome, however, because the presence of poll watchers—humans who inevitably have biases of their own—might only make matters worse. “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords,” poll chaplains might quote from Deuteronomy. “Mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.” The same is not true, alas, of God’s children.
In my conversation with Patton, there was ample evidence of the important role poll chaplains could play. “One of our poll chaplains who lives in Oshkosh, Wisc., there’s only one early voting site where she lives. And people there were yelling at each other about parking places and waiting in line. And so she went ahead and was helping direct traffic—you know, helping people park. And just, again, the purpose is to be that non-anxious presence.” Taylor, too, had stories about poll chaplains stepping in to help de-escalate a voting site. “There was a situation in North Carolina where someone tried to bring a gun into a polling place, and one of our poll chaplain clergy was able to divert them,” Taylor told me—no small achievement. But there is also the possibility for overreach. “Someone drove up to a polling site in a big kind of MAGA truck with lots of MAGA paraphernalia and kind of attempted to intimidate voters in a Black neighborhood,” Taylor recounted. “And a group of clergy poll watchers approached the person in the truck and convinced them that this probably isn’t the best place for them to be, and got them to leave.” My emails to the poll chaplain at the center of this story were not returned.
It seems fair, on the one hand, to allow the public some oversight of the voting process, but given the history of voting in America, it also seems insane.
Beyond concerns about our system’s reliance on the subjective judgements of unelected officials (and never mind how those judgements can be weaponized by the media, or turned into long and protracted lawsuits that inspire doubts about election results), religious leaders and institutions on all sides of the political divide are mobilizing their clergy and congregations to watch the polls on Election Day. “[God] said, ‘start a group called the Lion of Judah. Start a 501c4, get out there, and help my body come together as one,’” Joshua Standifer, who leads a group called Lion of Judah, told a crowd in Wisconsin in September. A former Republican opposition researcher now working to “release the ROAR of Christian Voters across America,” Standifer deploys religious language and imagery to mobilize Christians against those who would steal the 2024 election, as he believes the Democrats did in 2020. One of the main ways he is doing this is by recruiting poll watchers. Standifer wants to insert Christians into “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers,” which he sees as “the first step on the path to victory this Fall.” In training literature, Lion of Judah’s poll watchers were instructed to report voter fraud not to election workers or state officials but to the Lion of Judah tip line.
Taylor is right that voters’ trust in elections will need to be rebuilt over time, but the same is true for their trust in everything else, including religious clergy and institutions. In 1973, less than a decade after faith leaders fought to pass transformational civil rights legislation, 65 percent of Americans had trust in religious institutions; today that number sits at 32 percent. The percentage of people who have faith in other key institutions—our schools, hospitals, banks—has also halved over the same period. The United States now sits at the bottom of all G7 countries when it comes to confidence in our leadership, military, judicial system, national government, and elections. There is no institution in America—not one—that is widely trusted.
There is no equivalency between those poll watchers coming to keep the peace and those coming to disrupt it, those coming to de-escalate violence and those coming to cause it. But for the weary voter trying to do her civic best, it might be hard to differentiate between the two. Americans hold understandably divergent views on the motivations of their political opponents—what inspires comfort and calm for one voter might inspire terror in another. The net result is that, for the tens of millions of voters arriving at their polling places tomorrow, many will find crowds of activists and partisans and watchers and reporters and lawyers and protesters—a sight that might help us better understand the tens of millions of American voters who simply decide to stay home.