特朗普及其共和党盟友如何动员大选日投票站监督员

How Trump and his GOP allies are mobilizing to send monitors to the polls on Election Day

2026-09-25T09:00:29.332Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/25/politics/trump-election-monitors-voting-machines-vis

President Donald Trump and his allies inside and outside his administration are aiming to blanket polling places with an expanding network of party and federal election monitors this November, intensifying scrutiny of the nuts and bolts of voting as Trump hunts for what he claims, without evidence, is widespread cheating and fraud in US elections.

Trump’s Justice Department says it will dispatch more than 1,000 monitors on Election Day in what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has called the “biggest DOJ election observer effort in history” — hundreds more than the Biden administration deployed in 2024. New records reviewed by CNN suggest that several DOJ monitors deployed during this year’s primaries helped challenge Trump’s 2020 election loss. Another pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a government elections website in 2016.

While most jurisdictions that hosted DOJ monitors during the primaries reported no issues with their presence, federal observers sent to Wyoming were accused of disruptive behavior by Republican officials in the state.

Critically, there is no evidence that the monitoring efforts will disrupt polling places or prevent anyone from voting in November. Justice Department monitors and partisan observers have long been part of Election Day.

Separately, the Republican National Committee is training new “special monitors” to scrutinize voting machines — recording serial numbers, inspecting security seals and photographing results tapes — and report any concerns or discrepancies to the party’s legal team through a special hotline, according to RNC training materials from Wisconsin that have not previously been reported on.

The effort comes as Trump and his allies intensify claims that voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and fraud, with some seeking to ban them altogether.

“Having you all on the ground, notifying us of issues, allows us to take direct action,” an RNC official told a group of special monitors in Wisconsin on a July training call. “And this leads to real outcomes that benefit Republicans across the state.”

It marks the latest expansion of a Republican election monitoring apparatus that has grown dramatically since 2020 and helped generate anecdotes, allegations and legal challenges questioning whether recent elections were run properly and transparently.

But some fear the widening web of party and federal monitors could mean far more incidents — even minor errors or baseless claims of fraud — are elevated and could be used by Trump and his allies to reinforce claims that US elections are not secure, or even rigged against Republicans.

“All of this sounds typical, but these are not typical times,” said Tammy Patrick, chief program officer for the National Association of Election Officials. “In the past few years, election officials have said to me, ‘It’s like they’re showing up looking for the body.’”

Both the RNC and DOJ have defended their observation initiatives, saying they will follow the law and reject concerns that the efforts will fuel unwarranted disputes or unfounded challenges.

“DOJ staff are expected to do their job consistent with all legal and ethical obligations. No exceptions,” DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels told CNN in a statement. “To imply that our team will act improperly based on nothing more than speculation would be dishonest.”

The second Trump administration has undertaken a dramatic overhaul of the Justice Department and particularly its Civil Rights Division. The division’s voting section — where nearly all career attorneys were pushed out early into Trump’s second term — has shifted its focus to identifying non-citizen voters and other potential evidence of fraud.

The administration’s plans to flood November’s election with monitors has dovetailed that message. During this year’s primaries, some monitors deployed by DOJ to states like Arizona and Virginia were recently hired attorneys who previously helped challenge or try to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, according to communications obtained by Democracy Forward and shared with CNN. Here’s what we know about those individuals:

The administration also dispatched David Levin to Arizona and Minnesota as a monitor during the primaries. Levin, a conservative attorney hired at DOJ earlier this year, was accused in 2016 of carrying out a cyberattack to obtain credentials and enter restricted sections of a county elections website in Florida. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and served 20 days in jail, calling the episode a “silly political stunt” intended to expose weaknesses in the election office’s cybersecurity.

Reached by phone this week, Levin told CNN he has “no comment” on his work at DOJ or whether he will be deployed on Election Day. Gardner, Voiland and Matheis did not respond to requests for comment.

“This is alarming,” Dan McGrath, Special Counsel, Oversight at Democracy Forward told CNN in a statement, adding that the choice of some election monitors “raises concerns that people’s right to vote will not be respected by the administration.”

Election officials in a half-dozen jurisdictions that were sites of DOJ monitoring this primary cycle told CNN that, despite the hype around this year’s observation program, the government attorneys’ conduct at their election locations was professional, non-disruptive, and, as one local election chief put it, “business as usual.”

In several places, the monitors were focused on confirming jurisdictions were meeting requirements to offer language assistance for voters – in line with how federal observers have typically operated.

Election officials also noted that some of the observers had extensive experience, and that the DOJ official overseeing the monitoring program has spent decades in the department’s voting section.

“Every monitor will go through the same standard election monitor training which was given by DOJ for every election under previous administrations,” Pels told CNN in a statement. “The Department hired qualified individuals to serve our country in a non-partisan manner.”

But the plans to dispatch several hundred DOJ observers on Election Day have raised questions about whether all those attorneys will adhere to the department’s traditional standards – particularly as thousands of career attorneys have left the Department since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

The episode in Wyoming highlights how even in a red state, tensions can flare.

According to Laramie County Elections Director Debra Lee, her office got no heads up the two DOJ attorneys would be observing the Cheyenne-area polling sites — emails obtained by CNN show that DOJ initially sent notice of its plans to election officials in Wisconsin instead of Wyoming.

Local and state officials say that the DOJ attorneys quizzed election staff about their protocols and demanded information about the voting machines. They’re also accused of seeking to interview voters at the polling place. (DOJ election monitors have historically asked voters to voluntarily discuss their experiences at election sites, but according to a former official in the voting section, such interviews did not happen within the polling places.)

“If anything, their presence may make voters think twice about voting at the polls on Election Day,” Lee, a Republican, said in a statement last month. “My advice to my fellow county clerks in Wyoming and to election administrators in other ‘red’ states is don’t think this won’t happen to you.”

Records from Laramie County indicate the monitors were John Casali and Jake Bachand, both of whom joined the department under this administration.

Casali had served as an attorney at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. Bachand previously worked for Republican Reps. Troy Nehls of Texas and Matt Gaetz of Florida, two staunch Trump allies.

Casali and Bachand did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. Dhillon met with Wyoming’s governor after the incident, according to DOJ, which has defended its monitors’ actions.

“We ask questions to ensure polling locations are complying with federal law, including those related to language and disability access,” Pels told CNN.

She added: “Attempting to spin these questions to make our team appear fixated on the integrity of voting machines is dishonest and does not accurately portray our monitoring efforts.”

The interest in Wyoming’s voting equipment comes as Trump and his allies have launched other efforts to scrutinize voting technology. Machine-related conspiracy theories dominated Trump-world beliefs that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

Gathering information about voting machines has now become a priority for the RNC’s election observation activities as well.

Party observers play a different role from federal monitors. They represent a political organization and report back what they observe. Depending on state law, they may also be authorized to raise or formally challenge irregularities.

The RNC has spent the last several years aggressively rebuilding the infrastructure for the monitoring of the voting process, after a decades-old consent decree that limited observation activities expired in 2018.

This year, the party is organizing an effort to monitor how the operation of voting equipment works as well, according to materials obtained by CNN.

The RNC training materials cast the party’s new “special monitors” — who are separate from the Justice Department monitors — as the “bookends” of the voting process, concentrating on what happens to voting machines from preelection testing through Election Day.

The records, which include training documents and recordings of calls in July and August with “special monitor” volunteers in Wisconsin, were obtained by Fair Fight Action, a non-profit voting-rights organization founded by former Democratic state lawmaker and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and shared exclusively with CNN.

Attendees of the Wisconsin training were told that their information-gathering operation during the state’s August primary was a pilot program that the RNC hoped to expand to other states during November’s general election.

“The audit trail and security: This is something new that we are going to be focusing on this cycle,” said the Wisconsin RNC official conducting the training. “We’re kind of testing and piloting this operation in our state for the primary so that we can launch this more fully for the November general election.”

In Wisconsin, the observers were told to record machine serial numbers, confirm each tabulator starts with zero votes, and inspect seals designed to reveal tampering. After polls close, they’re told to photograph vote totals and check whether the number of ballots cast matches the number of voters who checked in.

The party has also prepared public-records request templates for volunteers to use if local clerks refuse to provide logs documenting the machines’ chain of custody.

“There may be a little bit of pushback from these clerks, but we’ll make sure you have all of the documentation that you need to reasonably obtain these results,” said Jenna Banfield, Election Integrity Director for the Wisconsin GOP, who helped lead the training calls.

Volunteers are instructed to report any concerns or discrepancies through a new party hotline to help RNC lawyers swiftly identify potential challenges against state or local election officials.

The RNC materials said their state teams contributed to more than 175 lawsuits in 2024 and that the party is on track to surpass that figure in 2026.

“This is the first real evidence we’ve seen that the RNC intends to aim their national grassroots poll operation directly at voting machines,” Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo told CNN in a statement. “A steady stream of machine-centered clips and complaints is designed to leave voters unsure the count can be trusted, which is exactly the ground they need to contest a race they lose.”

The volunteers will also scrutinize absentee ballot processing, which Trump and his allies have claimed is rife with fraud. They’ve been told to keep interactions with voters and workers measured, avoid any appearance of harassment and even “get to know” their local clerks.

“That is how we gain more access and trust and transparency,” Banfield said.

‘Eyes and ears’ on the ground

The RNC told CNN its Election Integrity operation is active in 22 states and will “serve as eyes and ears, helping us quickly identify and respond to issues to ensure smooth Election Day operations and to protect the ballot box.”

It will concentrate observers in places with narrow Republican margins or a history of alleged procedural problems.

“All these notes that you’re taking,” Banfield told a group of volunteers, “if they are handwritten with timestamps, that’s the gold standard because that’s something we can use as evidence.”

That infrastructure, the RNC training manual says, will allow the party to “deploy real-time legal and political resources that are critical to successful election outcomes for our top-ticket and down-ballot candidates.”

The RNC defended its operation, telling CNN that its election integrity teams previously identified testing errors in Virginia that were later corrected and flagged preelection testing delays across dozens of Texas counties.

During and after the 2020 election, the RNC, Trump campaign and allied activists mobilized a network of partisan observers, lawyers and activists who collected a trove of allegations of voting irregularities and pursued many in court.

Claims about “suitcases” of fraudulent ballots in Georgia and Arizona poll workers using Sharpies to invalidate Trump votes became pillars of the election-fraud narrative pushed by Trump and his allies. Investigations, court proceedings and probes by election officials found little evidence to support these allegations. Yet some continue to circulate today.

“On the on the one hand, having trained observers might cause fewer misinterpretations, but on the other hand, you have more people – especially if they have an orientation that the election is being stolen – that could create some additional narratives,” former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, told CNN.