In Hennepin County, Minnesota — one of the counties where conservatives groups have implemented an anti-voter fraud campaign called Election Integrity Watch — election judges have had firm exchanges with overly aggressive poll watchers who did not seem to know their the role.
“I think we were very firm, we had to be very firm with some of the polling place challengers who wanted to have more range in the polling place than the law permitted them to,” County Elections Manager Rachel Smith told TPMMuckraker. She said challengers were “having some questions” about where in the polling place they were allowed to stand.
Smith said that the challengers have been concentrated in the suburbs this year.
“The voters have been pretty unaffected by this, it was mainly just the initial time period when the challengers arrived and when the elections judges were getting settled and ready to work with the voters,” Smith said.
Elections judges, said Smith, “just had to very firmly, in some cases, describe or clearly define the role of a challenger based on our law.”
“I will say that the challengers did respect that, ” Smith added.
Minnesota Majority, the group which told supporters to go ahead and wear their “Please I.D. Me” buttons despite a judge’s ruling upholding a ban on such buttons, hasn’t heard of any confrontations, Executive Director Dan McGrath told the Associated Press.
The “overly aggressive vote challengers looking for fraud” had been “wandering into secure areas and challenging voters for the wrong reasons,” the AP reported.
Ryan J. Reilly
Ryan J. Reilly is a D.C.-based reporter for TPM. Prior to joining TPM, he worked for a news website covering the Justice Department and was a researcher for Bloomberg News. His email address is ryan(at)talkingpointsmemo.com.
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