By james art 
Poll watcher Jay Stone stands outside his Pleasant Prairie home ahead of the US presidential election in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Reuters)
As election officials in the Milwaukee area began counting mail-in ballots, activists supporting Donald Trump’s claim that his 2020 defeat was a fraud began challenging every ballot.
Observers raised a litany of complaints as poll workers read aloud the names and addresses of absentees, as required by the state of Wisconsin, according to local election officials, who said activists sought to intimidate volunteers.
The questions included objections that workers spoke too quietly, that the envelopes did not contain a signed form from the voter certifying that they had requested the ballot and even the presence of an ink scratch, officials said, adding that the outage caused long delays.
The scene at a school in the city of Glendale on July 2, during a Democratic primary for a seat in the state senate, played out similarly at two other polling places in the city and at the central ballot counting station in Milwaukee, with total by at least nine observers acting in coordination, according to election officials in the battleground state.
“Voting by mail is not safe,” said Harry Waite, one of three observers at Glendale City Hall, adding that he and his fellow observers did not try to intimidate anyone and sat quietly as the votes were counted.
“The whole system is fraudulent.”
Many local officials fear that the activists’ actions at polling places, while limited, were just a rehearsal for a much larger event on Nov. 5, when Republican Trump will face Democrat Kamala Harris in the race for the White House.
“It was an absolutely seamless general election,” Glendale Democratic Mayor Brian Kennedy told Reuters, adding that police were called to two polling stations by election officials and two observers were ordered to leave when it was decided that the contestation of the ballots is groundless.
“They challenged every absentee vote for whatever reason they could pull out of nowhere,” Kennedy said.
With the presidential vote days away, polls show the election is on a knife’s edge, with few seats as important as Wisconsin.
Kennedy and four other election officials interviewed by Reuters – three Democrats and one Republican – warned that a wider recount could cause disruptions and delays in sending results in this key state, which Democratic President Joe Biden won by a mustache in 2020
Warren Duggan, Glendale’s chief inspector of school elections in July, said he had to halt vote counting for 90 minutes while local officials advised how to respond to observers’ challenges to each ballot.
“If something like that happens next week in the general election, it’s going to be very difficult to get through anything.”
Wait is the former head of HOT (Honest, Open, Transparent) Government, a grassroots group that supports Trump’s baseless claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, which U.S. election security officials say are untrue.
Waite and Jefferson Davis, who heads another grassroots organization questioning the 2020 outcome, the Ad Hoc Committee for a Full Forensic Cyber Audit of Wisconsin, told Reuters they were working with like-minded groups to deploy up to 1,500 observers collectively at polling places and count centers across the state on November 5 and to observe and film the ballot boxes beforehand.
Reuters was unable to independently confirm those numbers. Waite and Davis, 66, work independently of each other.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Republican Party of Wisconsin said they have trained more than 5,000 election observers in the state, adding that their goal is to ensure the integrity and efficiency of the voting process.
Activists will particularly focus on mail-in ballots, watching for non-U.S. citizens who register to vote, students who haven’t been in Wisconsin long enough to be eligible and people who don’t have photo ID , according to Davis. He said he was working within the law and observers associated with his group would not cause trouble.
Meanwhile, Democratic Party officials told Reuters they were mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers in “voter protection” roles in key states to fight “MAGA Republican attacks on our democracy.”
“We stand ready to advocate for all eligible voters to get to the polls,” said Alex Floyd, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.
Wisconsin election officials are taking the activists’ plans seriously. They told Reuters they would have extra security at polling stations compared to the 2020 election. This includes an undercover police presence at some polling places, extra on-the-spot enforcement and street closures.
Vote watchers, who oversee the casting and counting of ballots at polling stations, have been a feature of American elections for decades.
Andrew Garber, a voting rights and elections adviser at New York University’s nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, said the big difference this time is that many of the pro-Republican election watchers belong to groups that suspect widespread foul play. in the 2020 election, so he can arrive prepared to spot problems.
“These poll watchers can scare people away, create bad voting experiences that discourage people from voting in the future, and that can be the genesis of misinformation that ultimately undermines people’s confidence in our elections,” Garber said.
Jay Stone, the head of HOT, told Reuters his group was being unfairly maligned by Wisconsin election officials, who he said made false allegations of disorderly conduct at the polls because they did not want election observers to exercise their legal rights to contest absentee ballots.
“The very nature of elections is competitive,” he added in an interview at his home in Pleasant Prairie, about 40 miles from Milwaukee. “Why should the casting and counting of ballots be anything but competitive?”
Pro-Republican watchdog groups are focusing on polling places in five “hot spots,” including the cities of Milwaukee and Madison, according to Waite and Davis. Those seats were the focus of Trump’s claims of fraud in Wisconsin in 2020.
Wait, Stone and others argue that mail-in ballots must be returned with a form signed by the voter certifying they applied for their ballot, otherwise one voter could apply for multiple ballots or claim someone else’s.
The Wisconsin Board of Elections has rejected such scenarios, saying it has designed mail-in envelopes that require voters to sign with a witness that they have applied to vote.
Wisconsin Republican Party spokesman Matt Fisher said Davis helped “recruit and send volunteers,” adding that the party has not communicated with Waite.
Russ Otten, chairman of the Wisconsin Sheboygan County Republican Party, called Waite a “phenomenal man,” adding, “Harry has been a crusader for the truth for many years.”
Under Wisconsin law, unlike most of the seven battleground states, election observers do not need to be affiliated with a party or be trained or certified in any way.
George Christensen, a Democrat and the Milwaukee County Clerk, the top elections official there, said police would be able to respond to problems at polling places in all 10 cities and nine villages in the county.
“If it becomes rude, obstructive, disrespectful or even violent, law enforcement will be available and ready,” he said. The district attorney also has an “election integrity team” on standby to respond to fraudulent ballot challenges, he added.
Anne Jacobs, a Democrat and chairman of the Wisconsin Board of Elections, said poll workers have been told to be especially vigilant for signs of trouble.
“These observers can be at arm’s length from election officials. There is a person literally staring at you and writing down your name. It’s embarrassing,” she said. “Their goal is to convince people that the elections are being stolen.
“Continuous threats against election officials are a stain on our democracy,” Jacobs added. “This very specifically involves Mr. Waite.”
Earlier this month, Waite posted a French Revolution-era photo of someone being guillotined on social media and suggested the same fate should befall Jacobs. He defended the post as a legitimate expression of free speech.
Jacobs declined to say what action, if any, had been taken against Waite, though she called him “very dangerous.”
“When people post pictures that suggest I should be killed, the relevant authorities are contacted and the threat is looked into,” she said. – Reuters