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Judge’s ruling a setback for GOP bid to police polls in urban Pennsylvania

Ruling won’t thwart potential intimidation by Trump supporters.

Supporters at a Donald Trump rally in central Pennsylvania in August. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Supporters at a Donald Trump rally in central Pennsylvania in August. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

A judge has rejected Pennsylvania Republicans’ bid for residents to serve as poll monitors anywhere in the state regardless of where they live, dealing a blow to Donald Trump’s hopes to mobilize rural voters into urban districts on Election Day.

The state party sued in late October over an 80-year-old law that restricts election monitors to their home counties, arguing that it infringes residents’ freedom of speech since many legislative districts cut across county lines. The lawsuit can continue, but the law will remain in effect on Tuesday after federal judge Gerald Pappert denied the party’s request for a temporary restraining order.

Pennsylvanians won’t be able to register as official poll monitors, with access to the check-in tables and authority to challenge voters, in places where they don’t live themselves. But while Thursday’s ruling makes it tougher for Republicans get inside polling places outside their home turf, much of what Trump’s people are up to doesn’t require that kind of special, official access.

Trump has explicitly asked his supporters to cross the kind of geographic boundaries that the court upheld Thursday. “Go down to certain areas to watch and study and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times,” Trump told voters in Altoona, Pennsylvania in August.

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He’s ratcheted up that call in speeches elsewhere down the stretch of the campaign, encouraging supporters to go to major cities like Philadelphia and keep tabs on voting there. Trump’s comments were widely interpreted as a call for mostly white GOP voters from rural communities to flock to largely black and latino precincts in Pennsylvania cities on Election Day to keep tabs on minority voters.

The defeat will constrict what Trump supporters can do on polling day, but the ultimate shape of the right’s election monitoring is hard to predict. Prominent Trump ally and notorious right-wing operative Roger Stone has rushed to cobble together a ground operation of volunteer poll watchers through an organization called Stop the Steal.

Thousands of people have signed up to help Stone’s quest in various states, potentially furnishing a small army of untrained, paranoid Trump activists.

The group has been vague about its exact plans. But its website offered official-looking ID badges for volunteers and encouraged them to record video of voters and unscientific tallies of how they think people voted.

Those bastardized exit polls will give Stone numbers to hold up next to official exit polls and actual outcomes after Election Day, providing a patina of analytic rigor to potential claims that Democrats stole the election. Stone’s efforts amount to voter intimidation, according to lawsuits filed by Democratic groups.

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Stone’s ragtag mob of exit pollsters is a wildcard. But the Trump campaign’s official election-monitoring operation is in the hands of another seasoned veteran of right-wing skunkworks. Mike Roman was in charge of the Koch brothers’ internal espionage service for years before Trump put him in charge of Election Day operations.

Roman held a number of GOP election positions in the years before that, but his real claim to fame is promoting video of New Black Panther Party members outside a Pennsylvania polling place in 2008. Roman’s career has been defined by a fixation on voter fraud and supposed ballot-rigging by Democrats.