Grassroots Election Integrity Efforts Go Full Scale This Midterms

By Terri Wu, EPOCH TIMES 14.10.22

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA – JUNE 21: A voter casts her ballot with her child at a polling station at Rose Hill Elementary School during the midterm primary election on June 21, 2022 in Alexandria, Virginia. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Grassroots election integrity efforts have risen to a new level for this year’s midterms.

With over 4,500 poll watchers and election workers trained, the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election integrity pilot program was a success, according to the Virginia Fair Election Coalition (VFE), a consortium of over 20 mostly conservative nonprofits.

Similar efforts are occurring in more states, with more volunteers contributing their time and unique expertise. All are laboring with the same goal in mind: a fair and transparent election.

“Across the country, people are waking up to how they can work as citizens to restore faith in the outcome of our elections,” Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chairwoman of Tea Party Patriots Action (TPP Action), a conservative grassroots advocacy group with about 3 million members nationwide, told The Epoch Times.

Following the template created by VFE in 2021, TPP Action has trained over 7,500 people on election integrity in multiple states, according to Martin. The group held state tours in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to offer election-related training sessions, including poll watching in urban and rural areas.

Based in Georgia, TPP Action also partnered with fair election coalitions in many states and participated in election integrity summits in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

The table below contains an incomplete tally of the coalitions’ work results.

“Volunteers are not just complaining about a problem but are taking the time to learn how to solve problems and then taking action based on that training,” Martin added.

‘It Impacts Everything’

Elizabeth in Texas’ Travis County, which covers Austin, is one such volunteer.

She had heard of election irregularities before the 2020 election but didn’t seriously look into these issues until after Nov. 3, 2020, when everyday citizens brought up their concerns about the vote and how it was handled and provided witness accounts. Through this process, she got to know other Texans who shared these worries.

Now Elizabeth is an overall coordinator of the “Texas team,” an election integrity task force consisting of 70 members, with between two to four representatives per county in 31 Texas counties. That’s about 12 percent of the 254 counties in the state.

Elizabeth is focusing on current and future elections because “people cannot talk about [the] 2020 [election] with any objectivity,” She told The Epoch Times. Elizabeth did not want her last name disclosed, fearing for her privacy and safety.

Her team is decentralized and doesn’t have an official name yet, she said. Different subgroups focus on different initiatives, including recruiting and training poll watchers, door-to-door canvassing to validate voter roll data, filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and persuading counties to stop using voting machines.

Elizabeth left her management consultant job in 2014 so that she could spend more time with her son, now 16. But since 2021, she has devoted herself to election integrity efforts.

“If we don’t have secure, well-run elections, then there’s nothing else that works properly in the country,” Elizabeth said. “It impacts everything—this will impact my child’s life.”

She added that if Americans couldn’t be certain about election security and the accuracy of the results, “then I don’t know where this country will go.” So she felt compelled to contribute her project management skills to the drive to secure the country’s elections.

While election integrity has become a hot-button and highly partisan issue since the 2020 election, this shouldn’t be the case, Elizabeth believes. Both sides should feel a sense of urgency.

“When are we going to look at it if Republicans don’t want to look at it when the Republicans win, and Democrats don’t want to look at it when the Democrats win?” she said.

Elizabeth became a registered Republican after the 2020 election.

“The left has left me,” she said, adding that the ideas of the left have become “extreme.”

In addition, as a moderate, Elizabeth was turned off by fellow liberals’ unfiltered comments about conservatives. “The mean and hateful things said about the conservative side are tragic and disturbing.”

To Elizabeth, the “general gaslighting” was the most challenging part of her efforts in advocating for more secure elections.

“What’s frustrating is that it feels like the press and the political parties are manipulating some kind of hatred of Trump to keep people from talking about the real issues,” she said.

Public Support

But the most rewarding part of Elizabeth’s endeavor was to know that many more people cared about the issue. From October 2021 to January 2022, the Texas team, using publicly available voter roll data, canvassed voters of the 2000 election in five counties: Bell, Bexar, Williamson, Hays, and Travis.

When door-knocking in these counties, volunteers asked questions to verify the voter’s address and whether the voter voted using the same method as recorded: absentee, mail-in, or in-person. The goal was to help with voter data clean-up, she said.

Elizabeth door-knocked in her home county, Travis, and other counties.

“Everywhere I go and everyone I talk to, they’re concerned,” she said.

“They don’t know what to do, and they want to do something. They want to be involved, and someone to tell them what to do.”

The team knocked on over 8,000 doors and spoke with over 5,000 people. Elizabeth estimated the responses to the canvassing were: 95 percent positive, 9 percent neutral, and 1 percent negative.

In her home county of Travis, one of the most consistently Democratic counties in the state, the team knocked on over 2,000 doors and spoke with 1,000 people. They recorded only two negative encounters involving people who were angry about the canvassing.

In Travis County, the team found about five percent of voters reported a different voting method for the 2020 election than that specified in county records. But Elizabeth noted that they would need additional data to verify voting method discrepancies. In addition, three percent of the canvassed voters didn’t live at the recorded addresses during the 2020 election, according to Elizabeth.

Six months ago, the team started providing feedback on data discrepancies to counties. In the past three months, some of the counties made some of their suggested updates to their voter rolls.

Efforts Ramp Up

Poll Watching Goes Digital

CONTINUE

Terri Wu is a Washington-based freelance reporter for The Epoch Times covering education and China-related issues. Send tips to terri.wu@epochtimes.com.