The Best Poll Observer Training in NC
Summer 2024 — One of the most important ways you can help ensure the integrity of elections is to volunteer as a poll observer (PO) in your state.
About half the states in America allow non-partisan observers, but North Carolina, Virginia, and Arizona (to name a few) require POs to be sponsored by a political party. For that reason, you need to contact the party of your choice and see if they are sponsoring poll observers for the upcoming election.
In NC, each party will require you go through some sort of training before they will sponsor you and this is NOT a bad thing.
Our problem with the Democrat training is they mainly focus on cases of “voter suppression” as the beginning and end of all poll observer functions. While we can all agree that nobody should “suppress” a voter, but the real reason is that Democrat angry lawyers have created a money machine by suing anytime the behavior can be documented.
The problem with Republican training is how they mainly focus on “defensive” training, whereby the POs are told to stay quiet and obey anything the Chief Judge (CJ) orders you to do. While that seems reasonable at first blush, it causes problems when the Chief Judge makes unreasonable demands.
We’ve met lots of former POs who got discouraged and swore off poll observing as a result of such behavior by the Chief Judge.
After pleading with NCGOP attorneys for more than a decade, offering to train their POs, and repeatedly being told, “no thanks,” I partnered with Jim Womack and Cleta Mitchell to form the NC Election Integrity Team (NCEIT) to offer solutions beyond NCGOP control.
NCEIT Supplements Your Party Training
NCEIT takes a different approach to the training and I strongly urge volunteers to take our training in addition to any training your sponsoring party requires. I say this for the following reasons:
- For starters, it free and the more you know, the more valuable you become.
- Our training reinforces the state and federal limitations imposed on POs, which is the cornerstone to what the parties teach.
- Beyond reviewing and reinforcing those limitations, we teach an engagement strategy that builds bridges with the election officials by helping when something happens that the CJ either didn’t see or didn’t realize was a no-no.
- Our scenario-based training models both the behavior that is forbidden and the proper response when the behavior occurs.
- Every one of our scenarios are reenactments of situations that actually happened to somebody in our organization.
- By taking our training and engaging with the CJ, you can get more involved in the process by getting a paid position during future elections. Election officials are always looking for more people to conduct the thankless task of administering the election, so why not you?
~ jd