RNC Building ‘Army’ of GOP Poll Workers After Decades-Long Court-Ordered Hiatus
Breitbart, Ashley Oliver
January 26, 2022
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is ramping up Republican presence at the polls this year by enlisting thousands of poll workers ahead of the midterms, an operation it legally could not run for nearly 40 years prior to 2018.
The committee is using this week specifically — the week of “Poll Worker Recruitment Day,” which officially took place Tuesday — to capitalize on its millions of Republican contacts by pushing out directives for people to become involved at the polls as both watchers and official workers.
“If elections are the cornerstone of democracy, then transparent and secure elections are one of the most important offerings that the RNC can have,” RNC spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez told Breitbart News. “And it happens to be the first cycle that we can get involved and stand up this operation the way that RNC chairwoman [Ronna] McDaniel has envisioned.”
The RNC is the primary campaign arm of the Republican Party and poured more than $800 million into electing Republican candidates in the last election cycle.
The committee however, unlike the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was prohibited under a 1982 consent decree from engaging in certain aspects of the election process — such as recruiting its own people to monitor polls on Election Day — up through December 2017, when the decree expired.
The consent decree was the result of a settlement with the DNC after the DNC sued its Republican counterpart for allegedly intimidating voters in predominantly Democrat areas of New Jersey during the state’s ultra-tight 1981 gubernatorial contest, as reported at the time by the Herald-News.
In a 2020 op-ed in the Washington Post, McDaniel detailed the numerous longstanding limitations the consent decree had placed on her organization and wrote of its newfound freedom that “the playing field” was “level again.”
“Democrats are deploying an ‘army of poll watchers’ this November, and for the first time in decades the Republican Party can too,” McDaniel wrote in August 2020.
While 2018 marked the first year after the consent decree that the RNC could partake in certain election activities, and 2020 marked the first year it could do so in a presidential race, 2021 and 2022 are the first election years where the RNC is operating independently of a campaign.
It previously worked under the umbrella of the Trump campaign. “What you’ll see in 2022 is fully housed under the RNC,” Alvarez explained.