The GOP drive to install thousands of poll workers sets off alarms

(((CNN))) State and local election officials in Michigan and other political battlegrounds are gearing up to deal with a new element in this year's elections: a large influx of Republicans seeking to become poll workers, recruited by the Republican National Committee and other conservative organizations to play an active role in administering the midterm elections.

The development and a recent story in Politico detailing GOP recruitment sessions and how some of these would-be poll workers cling to debunked claims about fraud in the 2020 election have raised alarms that Republican election deniers could infiltrate official election operations and undermine the process.

The surge in interest also comes against the backdrop of efforts by former President Donald Trump's allies, such as Steve Bannon, to carry out what he calls a "precinct committee strategy," with the goal of installing Trump loyalists in local Republican Party positions and election posts.

"It is jarring to know that there is a political party, or a cohort of a political party, that is feeding folks misinformation and will use that as motivation to potentially interfere with our elections and with citizens' right to vote," Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told Fredreka in a recent interview.

Benson, who said she has been following the uptick in GOP poll worker applications for weeks as part of her regular discussions with local election officials, met Monday with the state attorney general's office, the Michigan State Police and local officials to discuss, among other topics, how to protect against election interference, her aides said.

'Seat at the same table'

RNC officials say their recruitment drive has a straightforward goal: correcting a longstanding party imbalance in who serves in these roles. At Detroit's TCF Center in 2020, where election workers in the heavily Democratic city counted absentee ballots, Republicans made up 170 of the more than 5,400 poll workers, the RNC said.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/07/politics/gop-poll-workers-recruitment-ctzn/index.html