Scott Maxwell on the Importance of Poll Watchers
With the election less than 6 weeks away, the county party wants a lot more volunteers to man the polling stations, both as poll watchers and to wave signs at the early voting locations. That was the main message from Executive Director Scott Maxwell on Wednesday.
Scott wants to physically cover all 14 of the early voting locations with a unified Republican presence. Unlike the limited hours during the primary, the EV sites will be open fully 7AM to 7PM.
Poll watcher classes have already started so the time to sign up is now. To illustrate the importance of that job, Scott told us the story of the rampant voter fraud that had been perpetrated in his city of Lake Worth before he was elected to the City Commission, and how effective poll watchers put an end to it.
This is story I had never heard before, and as a current poll worker, I was skeptical that it could happen with our stringent processes on checking voter identification. As we heard though, with an inside job performed by criminal poll workers, anything is possible. Poll watchers are our only line of defense against it.
Here is Scott’s story:
In a convoluted scheme perpetrated by a coterie of far left activists, their teams went door to door seeking out those who had not voted lately, with the intention of identifying those who had died or moved away, but were still on the rolls. They then ran multiple candidates for each of the city commission seats to split the vote enough to force a runoff. When the runoff occurred, other volunteers flooded the polling places claiming to be those voters they had previously tagged as no longer eligible but still on the rolls. Since this can only work with the cooperation of the poll workers in the targeted precincts whose job it is to verify identity, it was accomplished by packing the precincts with poll workers who were part of the conspiracy.
Scott had always wondered why seemingly fringe candidates were winning these elections, and was able to ferret out how they were doing it by analyzing the voter history data for the main and runoff elections. The fix was simple – put poll watchers in the precincts to watch what was happening and prevent the fraud from taking place. This worked, Scott and other non-fringe candidates began winning elections, and the corruption has been stopped.
The evidence of collusion on the part of the poll workers was taken to the State’s Attorney and the Supervisor of Elections. Unfortunately though, time went by and ultimately the statute of limitations had passed and no prosecutions for voter fraud occurred.
So, become a poll watcher for November and help insure a fair and open election.
Next month, join us on October 24 for a discussion of constitutional amendments you are being asked to approve. The large number of complex ballot questions to appear in November require research to really understand the consequences of their passage. Let us help you through it with a distillation of the important issues and some recommendations on how to approach them. See who put the questions on the ballot, who supports them and who opposes them. You will come away enlightened!