After local Democratic parties in six battleground states filed lawsuits against Trump adviser Roger Stone’s voter fraud monitoring project, the Republican operative released new rules for volunteer monitors and pledged to a Nevada judge that he “will not target voters based on their race”.
Roger Stone, an informal Trump adviser, also told the Guardian on Monday that he was concerned that the Republican party in Ohio would try to manipulate votes to undermine Trump, and said that the Stop the Steal fraud prevention project was a “neutral process”.
Stone had announced the Stop the Steal voter fraud prevention project to the Guardian in late October. He said the effort was recruiting volunteers to conduct exit polls in nine Democrat-leaning cities in swing states in order to check for “election theft” via hacked or compromised voting machines. The cities he listed then – Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Fort Lauderdale, Charlotte, Richmond and Fayetteville – had large minority voting populations.
In response, local Democratic parties in six battleground states filed lawsuits against Stone, Stop the Steal, and Republican parties, alleging broad efforts to intimidate minority voters.
The new guidelines for the Stop the Steal volunteers nationwide come as another federal judge expressed skepticism that Democrats had any proof that the Trump campaign, local Republican parties, Stone and Stop the Steal were “conspiring to threaten, intimidate, and thereby prevent minority voters in urban neighborhoods from voting”, as Democrats had alleged in multiple lawsuits.
In Philadelphia, US district judge Paul Diamond denied Democrats’ request for a temporary restraining order on voter fraud prevention activities on Monday, ruling that Democrats had failed to make “any credible showing” that voters’ rights were in jeopardy. The judge slammed the local Democratic party for “belated, inflammatory allegations that appear intended to generate only heat, not light”.
The supreme court on Monday also denied a request to restore a sweeping temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge in Ohio last week, which had briefly enjoined the Trump campaign, Stone, and Stop the Steal, as well as the Clinton campaign, from engaging in a variety of voter intimidation behaviors. A panel of sixth circuit judges had quickly stayed the order, which a leading election law expert had dubbed “likely unconstitutionally vague”.
At a hearing Monday in Philadelphia, Diamond questioned whether news reports about potential voter intimidation were reliable enough evidence for Democrats to be granted a powerful temporary restraining order.
Two witnesses for the Pennsylvania Democrats, an African-American pastor and a Latino political activists, both testified that Trump’s insinuations about voter fraud in Philadelphia had troubled and alarmed them.
“It sent a chill through me,” Reverend Mark Tyler told the court, describing Trump’s comments that his supporters should monitor for voter fraud in other communities.
Both witnesses said they were afraid of poll watchers bringing assault weapons to the polls. While open carry of firearms is legal across most of Pennsylvania without any special license, in Philadelphia, only those with licenses can carry weapons.
But a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Republican party compared the lawsuit to the film Minority Report, in which the government has “a pre crime unit, and it arrests citizens based on crimes that have not been committed”.
“I feel like I’m in the middle of that movie, along with the Republican party,” attorney Rebecca Warren said. “There’s absolutely no evidence presented by the plaintiffs that the Republican party has attempted to engage in any kind of illegal activity or voter intimidation.”
Judge Diamond wrote in denying a temporary restraining order: “Neither witness knew of any actual voter intimidation efforts or of any voters who had actually been intimidated. Rather, both were concerned that Mr Trump’s statements ‘might’ or ‘could’ intimidate African-American or Latino voters. This is not proof of the likelihood of harm.”
The judge also criticized the Democratic party for filing a lawsuit so close to election day, and for attempting to call in the chair of the state Republican party as a witness on the day before the election, one of his busiest days of the year.
Federal judges in similar lawsuits in Arizona and Nevada had also shown skepticism about the role of the Trump campaign and local Republican parties in alleged voter intimidation, Judge Diamond noted in his ruling, though the Nevada judge has not yet ruled in the case.
In a court filing as part of the Nevada lawsuit over the weekend, Stone promised to email all of his exit polling volunteers across the country on Monday with a new set of rules, including not to talk to voters before they cast their ballots, not to photograph anyone at the polls or in line to vote, and not to videotape or audio record the comments of any voters without their permission. He also pledged to reiterate these rules in a conference call with volunteers on Monday night. The new rules have been posted on Stop the Steal’s website.
“The idea that these volunteers are thugs, how do you intimidate people when you’re only speaking to people after they’ve voted?” Stone said.
“Volunteers have to agree to follow a certain neutral script, can’t wear campaign paraphernalia, they cannot film people, thy cannot wear armbands, hats – it is a very neutral process.”
Volunteers had an extra incentive not to behave in any partisan manner, in order to encourage more people to participate in the poll, he said.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine, said that Stone’s new guidelines were an important win for Democrats, despite the lack of victories in the lawsuits themselves.
“The fact that Stone is putting up guidelines at all and disavowing any particular funny business will be helpful for any of Stone’s followers who might follow his lead,” Hasen wrote in an email. “Getting him on the record like this also makes it more likely he will face some kind of sanction later should he engage in dirty tricks. Even without a court order, it is a bad thing to lie to the courts.”
Stone had described the effort as a “scientific exit poll”, but Hasen had said it sounded more like a “goon squad”.
Officials across the political spectrum, including Alberto Gonzales, who served as attorney general under Republican president George W Bush, raised concern last week about vigilante poll watchers intimidating voters outside of the polls. The Oath Keepers, one of the country’s largest militia groups, and the National Socialist Movement, which is categorized as a neo-Nazi group, have both made public plans to quietly monitor for fraud at the polls.
Stone said Stop the Steal’s focus was not poll watching, or an effort to provide poll watchers, but a pure focus on monitoring for manipulation of voting machines. He said he believed there was a “strong case” that “there was a willful conspiracy to rig the machines for George W Bush in Ohio”.
“I think both parties engage in this,” he said.
Stone said the goal of organizing volunteers to conduct exit polls in key areas was to check if the official results of any precinct differed from the group’s poll by more than 2%. While slightly more than 2% might not be a concern, he said a 10% deviation would suggest to him that the voting machines had been “tampered with”. He conceded there might be some margin of error in the volunteer-run exit poll project.
“We’re just going to put it up online and we’ll tell you what our conclusions are, and you can reach your own,” he said. “Maybe there will be some pattern, or maybe there will be no pattern.”
He also said he was concerned that the group’s volunteers might be “infiltrated with political partisans” and that the group was trying to vet volunteers, focus on working with people they already knew, and not allow “people who are we don’t think are temperamentally fit” to conduct the exit polls.
“It has occurred to me that if one person at the polling places will scream racial epithets, the rest of us get blamed,” he said.
He said that Stop the Steal’s volunteers included supporters of Jill Stein and “die hard Bernie Sanders supporters” as well as “Donald Trump supporters for sure”. He called himself only an “adviser” to the project, and said that he was not deeply involved in the day-to-day organization of the effort, particularly because he was not dealing with the different lawsuits.
“Yes, I am a hard-nosed partisan, but intimidation is illegal, and we’re not going to do anything illegal,” Stone said.
He said that he himself would not be doing any exit polling on election day, because he planned to be “in Austin, Texas, doing commentary for infowars.com”.