GOP Election Denier Poll Workers Exposed by CNN
A CNN report claims Michigan GOP leaders encourage rule breaking at poll worker training session – [source: cnn.com/2022/09/07/politics/michigan-gop-poll-worker-training-invs/index.html)
Michigan GOP leaders encourage rule breaking at poll worker training session | CNN Politics
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.
Per the above article;
“(CNN) 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.
It’s an approach election experts fear could spur chaos and conflict in November’s mid-term elections and in 2024.
“There is no exception to following the laws; there is no ‘two wrongs make a right,'” said Wendy Weiser, a vice president at The Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks potential insider threats to the election process. Weiser said the center is seeing a spread in efforts by election deniers to infiltrate and manipulate the voting and vote counting process.
“If poll workers are not committed to following the law, to following the directions of election officials, to protecting the integrity of the election process, they can do serious harm,” Weiser said.
Concerns mount over partisan election training
Like its counterparts in fellow battleground states Arizona and Pennsylvania, Michigan’s Republican Party has conspiracy believers pushing for influence over the election process at all levels, from candidates for statewide office down to poll workers and observers. As CNN has previously reported, that’s partly due to a strategy by Trump allies of ceaselessly recruiting conspiracy-minded MAGA volunteers for rank-and-file party positions.
Earlier this year, unsuccessful GOP gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley called on Michigan poll workers to unplug election equipment “if you see something you don’t like happening.” In June, Kelley was charged with trespassing and other crimes in connection with the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The Michigan GOP group Election Integrity Force, which Colbeck helped start, pushes baseless claims about the 2020 election that feed suspicions about the fairness of upcoming elections. In a July session, as first reported by Politico, members of the group coached poll workers and observers to call 911 and bring law enforcement into election-related complaints.
The mounting efforts to influence poll workers have prompted concerns over election disruptions, forcing the state to establish a code of conduct for those individuals, said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Poll workers who don’t adhere to the rules will be removed “by the local clerk, if they violate the law … or in any way interfere with the administration of fair and secure elections,” Benson told CNN.
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.
In the lead up to the 2020 election, Colbeck posted on Facebook that Democrats were conspiring to commit electoral fraud and “manipulating the vote tallies transmitted from county election boards to the state board of canvassers.”
While serving as a poll challenger at a counting center in Detroit, Colbeck claimed he saw vote-tabulation machines connected to the internet. He submitted an affidavit to that effect for a lawsuit that Costantino filed a week after the election, seeking to stop the results from being certified and requesting an audit.
Costantino’s lawsuit, backed by Trump, drew national attention to her claims of election fraud. But a state circuit court judge dismissed the suit, stating that “no evidence supports Mr. Colbeck’s position.” Noting Colbeck’s Facebook posts, Judge Timothy Kenny said that his “predilection to believe fraud was occurring undermines his credibility as a witness,” before concluding that Costantino’s interpretation of events was “incorrect and not credible.”
Costantino filed an appeal, which was denied.
Colbeck’s continuing claims that machines hooked to the internet flipped votes in 2020 led Dominion Voting systems to demand a retraction from him last year, stating that his claims “are not just false but have been repeatedly debunked by bipartisan election officials, actual election security experts, judges, and numerous Trump administration officials and allies.”
Colbeck also has tried to get copies of election files and Dominion software, zeroing in on Canton Township — a part of his former state Senate district. Canton Township Clerk Mike Siegrist, a Democrat, wrote in an August memo to the town’s board of trustees that his office denied those parts of Colbeck’s public-records requests because releasing the files would “violate our contracts with Dominion and jeopardize future elections.”
Colbeck did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment”.
