They’re known as “poll watchers” or “election observers.”
They’re self-appointed people whose professed goal is to observe and monitor elections without violating voter privacy or disrupting elections.
Some say they’re watching to prevent election theft —the disproven claim that the election of Joe Biden was somehow stolen from Donald Trump in 2020.
Voting rights advocates argue that poll watchers are simply there to intimidate voters, particularly people of color.
Last week, a federal judge ordered a group in Arizona to stay at least 75 feet from ballot boxes and publicly correct false statements they made about that state’s election laws.
Overseeing the polls and now poll watchers in Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria.
“Regardless of where they're observing, there's a form that they have to fill out that very clearly spells out exactly what the rules are for observing,” Gloria told State of Nevada host Joe Schoenmann. “But if they do it here at the election center where we're processing mail, they're also required to watch a brief demonstration. That's a presentation that we give to them to further emphasize exactly what the rules are while they're here.”
Gloria said they maintain control and have an employee who supervises the entire process to make sure they’re not doing anything that would slow them down.
In the early voting period, which was 14 days, they had hundreds of poll watchers.
Before 2020, they barely had any poll watchers. Since that election, Gloria said that’s what appears to be the new norm.
And they’re not all affiliated with a certain party.
“What we try to do is out at the polls, make sure that we're giving equal opportunity for a nonpartisan, a Democrat and a Republican to be in to monitor what's going on there, he said.
There are 129 voting sites in Clark County. How do they supervise each of them?
“Basically, every one of my permanent staff members becomes a supervisor once we get into the election cycle, because there are literally hundreds of people that we pull in to help support the mail ballot process,” Gloria said. “Thousands of people assist with early voting and Election Day, we've also got a group of people that come in and may be former a team leaders out at early voting or Election Day sites that we call admin rovers.”
On Election Day, they’ll have 14 to 16 of those rovers who oversee three to five voting sites.
“We've got a good plan that we've used here for many years, even before the 2020 election, to make sure that we can quickly respond to all of our polling places, whether it's an issue with a voting machine, whether it's an issue with disruption at the polls, media, whatever it may be, we've got the bases pretty well covered,” he said.
Joe Gloria, registrar of voters, Clark County
