By Tim Reid
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (Reuters) -The moment election workers in the Milwaukee area started counting mail-in votes, activists backing Donald Trump's claim that his 2020 defeat was fraudulent began challenging every ballot.
The observers raised a litany of complaints as poll staff read the absentee names and addresses aloud, as required in the state of Wisconsin, according to local election officials who said the activists were seeking to intimidate the volunteers.
The issues included objections that the workers were speaking too softly, that envelopes did not contain a signed form from the voter attesting they requested the ballot and even the presence of an ink scratch, said the officials, adding that the disruption caused long delays.
The scene at a school in the city of Glendale on July 2, during a Democratic primary election for a state senate seat, was similarly played out at two other polling locations in the city, and at Milwaukee's central ballot-counting station, with a total of at least nine observers acting in coordination, according to election officials in the battleground state.
"Mail-in ballots are not secure," said Harry Wait, one of three watchers at Glendale city hall, adding that he and his fellow observers had not tried to intimidate anyone and sat quietly during the vote count.
"The whole system is fraudulent."
Many local officials fear the activist action at election sites, while limited, was merely a rehearsal for a much larger-scale event on Nov. 5, when Republican Trump goes up against Democrat Kamala Harris in the fight for the White House.
"It was absolutely a dry run for the general election," Glendale's Democratic Mayor Bryan Kennedy told Reuters, adding that police were called to two polling stations by election workers and ordered two observers to leave, when it was decided the ballot challenges were without basis.
"They were challenging every absentee ballot with whatever reason they could pull out of thin air," Kennedy said.
With days to go until the presidential vote, opinion polling shows the election is on a knife-edge, with few places as pivotal as Wisconsin.
Kennedy and four other election officials interviewed by Reuters - three Democrats and a Republican - warned that a repeat of the ballot-challenging on a wider scale could cause disruptions and delays to mail-in results in this pivotal state which Democratic President Joe Biden won by a whisker in 2020.
Warren Dugan, chief elections inspector at the school in Glendale in July, said he had to suspend vote-counting for 90 minutes while local authorities advised on how to respond to the watcher challenges to every ballot.
"If something like this happens next week in the general election it would be very difficult to get through everything."
Wait is the former head of H.O.T. (Honest, Open, Transparent) Government, a grassroots group that supports Trump's unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots are rife with fraud, which U.S. election security officials have said is not true.
Wait and Jefferson Davis, who heads another grassroots organization that questions the 2020 result, the Ad Hoc Committee For Wisconsin's Full Forensic Physical Cyber Audit, told Reuters they are working with like-minded groups to deploy up to 1,500 observers collectively at voting sites and count centers across the state on Nov. 5, and to monitor and film ballot drop boxes before then.
Reuters was unable to independently confirm those numbers. Wait and 66-year-old Davis work independently from each other.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and Republican Party of Wisconsin said they have trained more than 5,000 election observers in the state, adding that their objective was to ensure the integrity and efficiency of the voting process.
Activists will particularly focus on mail-in ballots, watching for non-U.S. citizens registering to vote, college students who have not been in Wisconsin long enough to be eligible, and people who do not have a photo ID, according to Davis. He said that he works within the law and observers linked to his group will not cause trouble.
Meanwhile, Democratic officials told Reuters they are mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers in "voter protection" roles across key states to combat "MAGA Republicans' attacks on our democracy."
"We're ready to stand up for all eligible voters' access to the ballot box," said Alex Floyd, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee.
Election officials in Wisconsin are taking activists' plans seriously. They told Reuters they will have extra security at polling locations compared to the 2020 election. That includes having undercover police present inside some voting sites, extra law enforcement on the ground and street closures.
'NATURE OF ELECTIONS IS ADVERSARIAL'
Poll watchers, who monitor the casting and counting of ballots at polling stations, have been a feature of American elections for decades.
Andrew Garber, counsel for the voting rights and elections team at the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the big difference this time round is that many of the pro-Republican poll observers belong to groups who suspect there was widespread foul play in the 2020 election so can arrive primed to spot trouble.
"These poll watchers can scare people, create bad voting experiences that discourage people from voting in the future, and it could be the genesis of misinformation that ends up undermining people's confidence in our election," Garber said.
Jay Stone, the head of H.O.T, told Reuters his group is being unfairly maligned by Wisconsin election officials, who he said made false claims of disorderly conduct at polling sites because they don't want election observers to exercise their lawful rights to challenge absentee ballots.
"The very nature of elections is adversarial," he added in an interview at his home in Pleasant Prairie, about 40 miles from Milwaukee. "Why should the casting and the counting of the ballots be anything but adversarial?"
The pro-Republican observer groups are focusing on voting locations in five "hotspots", including the cities of Milwaukee and Madison, according to Wait and Davis. Those places were the focus of Trump's claims about fraud in Wisconsin in 2020.
Wait, Stone and others argue that mail-in ballots should be returned with a signed form from the voter attesting that they applied for their ballot, otherwise a single voter could apply for multiple ballots or ask for somebody else's.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission rejected such scenarios, saying it has designed mail-in envelopes that require voters to sign with a witness that they applied for the ballot.
Wisconsin Republican Party spokesperson Matt Fisher said Davis assisted in "recruiting and sending volunteers," adding that the party has not communicated with Wait.
Russ Otten, chair of the Sheboygan County Republican Party in Wisconsin, called Wait a "phenomenal person", adding: "Harry's been a crusader for truth for many years."
GUILLOTINE POST FIRES ENMITY
Under Wisconsin law, unlike in most of the seven battleground states, poll observers do not need to be affiliated to a party, or be trained or certified in any way.
George Christenson, a Democrat and the Milwaukee County clerk, the top election official there, said police will be able to respond to problems at polling sites in all the county's 10 cities and nine villages.
"If it gets egregious, obstructive, disrespectful or even violent, law enforcement will be available and at the ready," he said. The county district attorney also has an "election integrity team" on standby to respond to bogus challenges of ballots, he added.
Ann Jacobs, a Democrat and chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said polling site staff have been told to be extra vigilant for signs of trouble.
"These observers can basically be an arm's length away from poll workers. There's a guy literally staring at you taking your name down. That's intimidating," she said. "Their goal is to convince people that the election is being stolen."
"Continual threats against election officials are a stain on our democracy," Jacobs added. "This very specifically includes Mr. Wait."
Earlier this month Wait posted a French Revolution-era picture on social media of someone being guillotined, and suggested the same fate should befall Jacobs. He defended the post as a legitimate expression of free speech.
Jacobs declined to say what action, if any, had been taken against Wait though she called him "very dangerous."
"When people put up photos suggesting I should be killed, the appropriate authorities are contacted and the threat is addressed," she said.