Why is the GOP posting more NC poll observers? It’s not about fraud.

The Republican effort to have more volunteers observe polling sites during voting isn’t about catching people casting fraudulent votes. It’s about harassing the people who conduct what Republicans now fear – free and fair elections.

For a telling example, consider Henderson County, a rural county of 116,000 just south of Asheville. If Republican counties are red, this one is scarlet. A Democrat hasn’t won there in more than 20 years. The last one to win was a candidate for tax collector who ran unopposed.

Despite those results, Republicans have stepped up scrutiny of poll operations there since former President Donald Trump started lying about stolen elections after his defeat in 2020.

Karen Hebb, director of the Henderson County Board of Elections, said the county Democratic and Republican parties usually send eight to 10 representatives each to serve as polling place observers. In this year’s May primary election, Democrats sent eight, but the number of Republican observers soared to 33. The county has 35 precincts. State law limits the number of observers to no more than three from one party at a polling site.

In a county where Republicans have trounced Democrats for decades, Hebb was puzzled by the surge in scrutiny. “I didn’t understand where they were coming from,” she told me. “They obviously were not there to watch the other party.”

No, they were there to watch Hebb, her staff and the poll workers, often retirees, who serve at the polls out of a sense of civic duty.

And the observers did more than watch. They continuously questioned poll workers. They wanted to approach the voting equipment. They demanded to be present in the room where data was uploaded, tried to take photos of paperwork and followed a poll worker to the elections office to make sure the votes were delivered.

Hebb, who has worked for the county’s election board since 1986, said, “They’re just in your face. They want to say, ‘I got YA!.’ “

When the State Board of Elections surveyed counties about the poll observers, more than a dozen said there were problems. A sampling of the responses:

Craven County: “There were several [observers] that weren’t aware of where they could and could not be in the polling place. While most were perfectly fine, several demanded to be behind the machines to watch people vote. When told they could not be behind the voting equipment several became argumentative.”

Cabarrus County: “One observer was ejected/barred for refusing to listen to the CJ [the precinct chief judge] and positioning herself between a voter and the tabulator. When asked to move by the CJ, she refused and became argumentative, all while the voter was trying to insert his ballot.”

Buncombe County: “Inside, a poll observer gave a voter information on who to vote for. Outside, observers being argumentative with each other. Observers asking many questions about procedures, more than ever before.”

In response to such issues, the state board’s three Democrats and two Republicans unanimously approved new rules defining what poll observers can and can’t do.

That should have resolved the issue, but since the point of adding more Republican observers is about disrupting voting rather than detecting fraud, it didn’t. Conservative activists asked the N.C. Rules Review Commission to block the new rules and the commission – dominated by partisan Republican appointees – obliged.

The State Board of Elections is weighing if and how it will respond, but for now it looks like an even larger contingent of GOP observers will descend on the polls in November without new guidelines restricting them from interfering with the voting process.

Hebb wishes North Carolina Republicans would call off the conspiracy purveyors and believers who want to meddle in the conduct of voting. “I really wish some of our elected officials would just stand up and back elections,” she said, “but they are not.”

No, they’re not, not even in Henderson County, where Republicans aren’t content to just beat Democrats. They want to defeat the democratic process, too.