Pro-Trump group planned to 'monitor' the polls by donning fake IDs, videotaping voters
Donald Trump has repeatedly asked his supporters to go out and "monitor" polling places in suspiciously non-Trump districts (he means places where Not White People live), and Trump ally Roger Stone is happily helping to oblige with some characteristically unsubtle efforts. One is called "Vote Protectors," which plans to "protect" the vote by 1.) issuing fake ID badges, 2.) videotaping voters at the polls to make sure everything's on the up-and-up and 3.) interviewing voters to create their very own Trump-friendly "exit polls." After the Huffington Post caught wind of these efforts, the group is backing down on two of the three.
Stone’s group created an official-looking ID badge for its volunteers to wear, and its volunteers planned to videotape voters and conduct fake “exit polls,” efforts that election experts say risks intimidating and confusing voters. Or at least that’s what the group was planning to do before The Huffington Post asked Stone about it on Tuesday.
So you could print out an "ID badge" with any ol' name you wanted and you were given detailed instructions on how to upload videos of the voters you ran across. Those two schemes have, after Stone was asked about it, been pulled from the site: Stone called both of them "bad ideas" that he claimed not to have known about.
The third effort remains, and like the first two it seems less an avenue for exit-polling the vote and more like the invented mechanism for claiming "fraud" if Angry Talking Summer Squash doesn't win the day. Because you don't have to, you know, actually conduct any polling to enter your results showing Donald Trump is winning bigly in whatever district you say he is:
[A]nyone registered as a volunteer with Vote Protectors can tally up votes at any time, for Trump or any other candidate, in what the site calls its “exit poll.” HuffPost accidentally logged two votes for Trump on Monday, visible below, despite having never entered an electoral precinct, and using a fake name.
And it's another swing and a miss. Nevertheless, we can all look forward to furious conservatives inundating the press with results from "Vote Protectors" showing Donald Trump really won by eleventy million percent, and Why Aren't The Networks Covering This. Oh, goodie.