(Reuters) - Democrats are mounting their most extensive voter protection effort ever to gird for what Joe Biden called his biggest fear: the prospect that President Donald Trump will try to interfere with the Nov. 3 election or refuse to accept its outcome.
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| FILE PHOTO: A volunteer poll site worker at the Edmondson Westside High School Polling site sanitizes a write-in ballot station after it was used during the special election for Maryland's 7th congressional district seat in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., April 28, 2020. REUTERS/Tom Brenner/File Photo |
Interviews with more than a dozen party officials reveal how Democrats, in coordination with Biden’s presidential campaign, are preparing for fights over absentee ballots, potential voting recounts and the possibility that Trump’s Republican supporters will seek to intimidate voters at the polls.
The Democratic Party has hired voter protection directors in 19 key states to lead more comprehensive operations than in past cycles and filed a record number of lawsuits ahead of the election trying to make voting easier. Thousands of election monitors and lawyers will be mobilized across the country on Election Day, the officials told Reuters.
Republicans say that while they are making routine preparations for recounts and voting irregularities, they are more focused on combating efforts to expand mail-in balloting.
Trump has cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, which have been used in far greater numbers in primary elections amid the coronavirus pandemic. He has also made unsubstantiated allegations that voting will be rigged and has refused to say he would accept official election results if he lost.
A person briefed by the Biden campaign on its strategy told Reuters that the former vice president’s staff was bracing for a “nightmare scenario” in which Trump is leading the in-person vote count in battleground states on election night but complains the contest is being stolen from him in ensuing days as mail-in ballots get counted.
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