BTW report on that election tampering, how they're moving the bar. Now, election security rules themselves are suspect and illegal.
Quote:
The evening before Michigan's state primary, Wayne County GOP leaders held a Zoom training session for poll workers and partisan observers -- warning them about "bad stuff happening" during the election and encouraging them to ignore local election rules barring cell phones and pens from polling places and vote-counting centers.
"None of the constraints that they're putting on this are legal," former state senator Patrick Colbeck told trainees on the August 1 call.
As far as cell phones, "I would say maybe just hide it or something, and maybe hide a small pad and a small pen or something like that because you need to take accurate notes," Cheryl Costantino, the GOP county chairwoman and host of the call, told participants.
Some participants raised concerns about being tossed out if they broke the rules. "That's why you got to do it secretly," Costantino replied.
While volunteer partisan observers have always been trained by political parties and non-profit groups in Michigan, the Wayne County GOP had also invited poll workers -- people hired and paid by the local clerk's office. They are in charge of running the election, and their responsibilities can include checking voter IDs, counting ballots, and even securing voting equipment at the end of the day. Poll workers are required to engage in non-partisan training overseen by the local clerk and are only identified as Republicans for the purposes of making sure there is equal representation of both major parties working the election, according to the Michigan Bureau of Elections.
During the Wayne County training call, obtained by CNN, the presumption that Democrats cheat -- thus justifying Republican rule-breaking -- permeated the discussion. It offers a snapshot of one of the ways Trump-backing, MAGA-minded conspiracy theorists are intervening in the election process across the country, sometimes encouraging poll workers or volunteer observers to violate election rules in hopes of finding evidence that Democrats might be doing the same.
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The GOP has "made a concerted effort to put election deniers in positions where they can gum up the works, afterward, if they don't win," said Jeff Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party.
The training sessions are providing a thinly veiled, read-between-the-lines instructions that essentially show "people how to break the law without expressly telling them to break the law, in most cases," said Timmer, an advisor to the Lincoln Project, a political action committee founded in 2019 by Republicans and former Republicans opposed to Trump.
Both Costantino and Colbeck, the trainers on the Wayne County call, have actively promoted 2020 election conspiracies that amount to make-believe.
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At the Wayne County election training session last month, Costantino and Colbeck said they were tracking scores of Democrats who Colbeck said "were trying to masquerade as Republicans" while signing up to work elections.   Colbeck told participants, "We're going to have to keep our heads on a swivel and just start documenting irregularities."
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She also said she considered the regulations, outlined in clerk-led trainings that barred cell phones and pens, to be unconstitutional.
"It should not be illegal," she told CNN, adding, with respect to election fraud claims, "If they're going to call us out and say, 'prove it,' we have to be able to prove it."
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The rules about phones and pen and paper aren't uncommon, said Jennifer Morrell, a co-founder of The Elections Group, a nonprofit led by former elections officials that focuses on protecting the election process.
"Anytime we had anybody working around ballots, we'd ask them not to have a pen, to eliminate any perception that anybody might mark a ballot," she said.
Well there you have it, the anti-cheat people want to overturn the rule that you can't have pens in the ballot-counting room.
