Democrats launch nationwide poll-monitoring effort for November midterms

Project adds early-vote push and disinformation response network

The Association of State Democratic Committees, an arm of the Democratic National Committee, announced the program on Monday. Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and president of the ASDC, said the initiative is “much more extensive and coordinated than the party has been in the past on election protection.”

“We didn’t want to be caught flat-footed on election day or leading up to election day,” Kleeb said.

Under the plan, each state party will have a trained election protection director, and volunteers will wear blue vests to provide a visible presence intended to counter voter intimidation, including by federal agents. The party aims to train volunteers at 25 percent of the nation’s 95,000 polling places, with a focus on districts with competitive races across all 57 states and territories.

The project has three components. The first is the poll-monitoring program. Volunteers are being trained to “be happy” and respond to voter needs, including helping them find a polling location if they are in the wrong place, informing them they can cast provisional ballots if they need to, and documenting whether others at the polls are hindering voters.

“We don’t know if there are going to be a bunch of insurrectionist types out there trying to intimidate voters, but we’re going to be there happy with information, but we’re also going to be there trained to document if the other side is doing things that are violating the law,” Kleeb said.

The second component is the party’s first national early-vote campaign, telling voters to “bank their vote” by casting ballots early by mail or in person. The campaign will include advertising focused on communities the party considers at risk of Republican election interference. Kleeb said the campaign will include more explicit directions to voters than past get-out-the-vote efforts, urging them to vote early and not let a mail ballot sit on their kitchen counter for weeks before turning it in. The party will also push for people to vote early in person.

The third component is a “democracy defense network” led by Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, designed to identify and counter tactics that can sway elections, including disinformation, dark money, manipulation via artificial intelligence, and election subversion. The network will allow state parties to communicate with each other about these threats to share knowledge, with a goal of getting ahead of such tactics before they gain traction.

The plan comes amid heightened concern about possible federal intervention in the midterm elections. The Trump administration has not explicitly ruled out sending federal agents to cities during the election, and some of the president’s allies have called on him to send immigration agents to the polls. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said immigration agents’ job is not to patrol polling places, but they could go to polling places if there was a threat or to serve a warrant.

President Donald Trump has personally made a series of interventions that have raised concerns about potential interference in the upcoming elections, including the possibility of declaring a national emergency in a bid to exert greater control over the process. Kleeb said the party could not predict Trump’s actions.

“We don’t know what Donald Trump is going to do. We’ve heard some of the things that he may do, but none of us can predict his behavior,” she said. “He’s so chaotic. All of us have witnessed certainly that. So the earlier you can vote, the better.”