How Poll Watchers Could Help Trump Challenge the Election Results
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Ever since 2020, Donald Trump has asserted that the election was stolen from him. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. It's a dangerous game. By casting doubt on the integrity of our elections, Trump has not only eroded democracy, but alienated some of his supporters. Why even vote if your vote is just going to get stolen anyway?

That's where poll watchers come in. While the Harris campaign is focusing on getting out the vote, the Trump campaign has turned its efforts to guarding the vote, recruiting an army of poll watchers to stand around and look out for instances of voter fraud. These RNC poll watchers are meant to be reassuring to Republicans who are worried about their votes not being counted. But they're also meant to provide evidence for lawsuits and court battles after the election should Trump lose again.

Antonia Hitchens, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, has been tracking the RNC's poll-watching operation. She's here today to talk about what to expect from poll watchers on and after Election Day. You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. Hey, Antonia. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. So you recently wrote a long feature about how the Republican Party is ramping up its poll-watching efforts.

I'm wondering if we could start by just having you describe what a poll watcher is and how it's different from being like a poll worker. Sure. So poll watching has been...

part of the landscape of American democracy for over a century. And it's essentially a term for a person who is trained to observe the election procedures. And generally, both parties will have a certain number of trained poll watchers at each polling station just to monitor that all the protocols are being observed and if there are any discrepancies or questions to kind of report those and have people on hand to come and address them. And

It's been something that I think for the most part hasn't been seen as a process that traditionally is subverted by one of the political parties for their own kind of desires to win the election. But we have seen that change in this cycle. Yeah. So my understanding is that the RNC was actually banned from poll watching for a decent span of time. And then I think in 2017, they were allowed to do it again. Can you explain why they were banned in the first place and then what it is that changed? Yeah.

Sure. So in 1981, they sent what they called a National Ballot Security Task Force to a minority heavy precinct in New Jersey where they actually had armed off duty police officers monitoring the voting. And after that, they were put under a federal ban.

consent decree until 2017, which effectively banned them from poll watching activity because there were concerns that it was kind of designed to discriminate and suppress the vote. And after 2017, when that decree was lifted, when the 2020 election rolled around, Trump told all of his supporters that

go and guard the vote, go and watch and make sure they don't cheat. At that point, it was much more kind of slipshod. And, you know, he would say this in rallies, you know, the Democrats, they cheat so much, you got to go watch them. But there wasn't really a meaningful infrastructure in place allowing for those trainings to happen, let alone for people to kind of meaningfully get involved before the election. It was much more, as we saw after the 2020 election, people kind of

showing up willy nilly to whether it was Detroit or Philadelphia and trying to look in windows and say, oh, this this seems a little bit strange to us. It didn't grow out of a kind of meaningful training program that the RNC implemented. And so what's different now? Like, is there a meaningful training program in place now?

So when Michael Watley and Laura Trump took over the RNC in March of this year, one of the big things they spoke about, the kind of buzzword of the season is election integrity, because they have so many of their kind of base supporters who need to be reassured that elections are not fraudulent and that they should bother to participate and should bother to vote. And they actually did.

turned off a lot of people, I think, last time when Trump said, this is all just a big sham and it's fake. And so what they've done in part is they've mobilized these kind of, quote unquote, election integrity teams that are designed to come up with programs like these poll watcher trainings, where the idea is that the base can kind of be brought back into the process by being trained as poll watchers. And then they can go and actually see what happens on election day and feel like

in some ways, I guess, reaffirmed that the process is above board. And then also, if they feel that they see something that looks odd to them, call the Republican lawyers and say, you have to come here. There's a big problem. But there is actually, by their count, over 100,000 poll watchers have been trained and they've had a kind of traveling roadshow where they've brought in surrogates, you know, like Lita Mitchell and Carrie Lake to

do these boilerplate PowerPoint sessions. It's not a tremendously complicated job, I wouldn't say. You essentially stand there. But they have kind of made it a more official infrastructure. So you brought up two kind of interesting reasons for poll watchers just now, and I kind of want to get into both of them a little bit more. So the first is that this is a way to assure Republicans who kind of believe that elections are no longer fair and that their vote is going to get stolen, that in fact their votes for Trump will be counted.

And so I guess, like, how much should we be looking at poll watching as a kind of turnout effort? Like, you know, kind of making conspiratorial Republicans or jaded Republicans feel confident that their votes are being counted? Yeah.

You read about how Republicans are a lot less organized than the Democrats when it comes to, like, get-out-the-vote efforts and door-knocking and whatnot. And I'm wondering if this is actually the get-out-to-vote effort in, like, a weird roundabout way. This cycle, I think they definitely encountered this kind of funny problem of,

recognizing that a lot of these traditional efforts to get people out to vote are also incredibly boring compared to going on Facebook or going on TikTok and just kind of chatting with your friends about how things might not be legit. And so instead of having the kind of traditional groundwork that one might have ahead of an election where tons of volunteers are going door knocking, they had many more people who wanted to pull watch and make sure that they were ensuring that the election was

above board. And so they actually did, I think, a pretty good job in turning those people into volunteers by saying, well, if you really want to believe that this is above board, you can come and watch the polls for us. And so I think in some ways it was designed as almost like a PR effort to bring the base back in and say, we'll show you everything that goes on. And if they cheat, we're going to take it really seriously. But I did encounter a lot of people who, even though they had been trained as poll watchers, still felt like

even if we see in our precinct that it looks okay, how do we know what's really going on? And there's kind of still the generalized threat of, well, what if they are doing something that we don't know about? And so I think in some ways this good idea

could also end up not working out super well because you'll see the same people who come out to be reassured leaving, I think, a little bit more disturbed. I personally, leaving the training session, sometimes felt like it's incredibly confusing at first to be told the ballot scanners are going to have zeros at the beginning of the day. And when you leave, if X isn't in place and there's not a sign posted here, there's just, I think, huge capacity for being confused and then thinking that

something's wrong with the election. And so I think the kind of notion of reassurance could also be translated into a lot more paranoia and confusion. But it will be interesting to see whether or not people come out the other side thinking 2028 is going to be a real election because we saw this one was secure, or if it's just, you know, complete pandemonium.

That's so interesting. I want to talk more about the efforts that are already sort of in place to potentially challenge the outcome of the election on the Trump side. But first, we're going to take a quick break. You'll hear more of the political scene in just a moment. ♪

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Because here's the thing. Our electoral system works and Democracy Decoded will help you understand why. Listen now at democracydecoded.org or in your favorite podcast app. And a big thanks to Democracy Decoded for sponsoring the show. So we were talking about how part of the benefit of poll watchers is that the RNC can essentially use them as a way of gathering evidence of alleged voter fraud so that it's easier for Trump to challenge the election results if he loses.

In your piece, you talk about how on Election Day, the RNC plans to have war rooms staffed with attorneys who are operating an election integrity hotline ready to field calls from poll watchers. And I'm wondering if you can just kind of paint a picture of what all of this is supposed to look like and how organized it is. Because I was really struck by how much effort has gone into planning for something that hasn't happened yet.

Well, I think it's impossible to overstate how much more organized Trump's 2024 operation is than the 2020 operation, when after he lost the election and kind of wanted to be able to win the election, was calling on Rudy Giuliani and the MyPillow guy to come to the White House and kind of concoct these pretty unreasonable schemes for ways to turn everything around for him, where even his own team was saying, sir, there's a 5%.

5 to 10% chance that any of this could ever pan out. But Corey Lewandowski in 2016 had told Trump he had a 5% chance of becoming president. And so I think even those really slim odds made Trump think, let's try all of this stuff. And I mean, we all saw how that went.

This time around, he didn't want to have the same possibility of failure, I think, if the result was really close and he wanted to challenge it. And so he has a much more kind of adults in the room team assembled who are going to be able to take on those cases should they become necessary for him. And that includes even just the RNC being willing to actually take these cases, which in 2020, many of the lawsuits were so flimsy and so kind of just

pulled out of the ether that no serious lawyer wanted to have their name attached. Whereas this time, they're preemptively filing tons of lawsuits so that if it becomes necessary to say, well, hang on, we have to recount one state because potentially student IDs electronically were used when they shouldn't have been. They have all of that kind of teed up to rely on as needed. And so it feels much more composed and serious whether or not it's used or can yield any result that they want remains to be seen.

So the RNC has already filed more than 100 lawsuits. And I'm wondering what exactly they're alleging, given that the election hasn't happened yet. Well, there are a series of lawsuits that I think when you look at every single press release and look through the filings, it's difficult to understand what it's really about until you kind of pan back a bit. But so if you think about

challenging potentially voters from abroad from the date that they sent in their mail-in ballot if you think about potentially trying to say oh we have we found tons of dead people on the voter rolls if you think the michigan secretary of state is sued for not making sure that a ballot number matches up with a different ballot number it's very kind of bureaucratic and

almost myopic when you look at them. But I think the idea is that later on, if there are questions, you have this kind of data that you can call upon to say, we need to look into this further and either do a recount or bring in our lawyers to say, we have questions about whether or not these votes should have been counted or whether or not they can suppress part of the vote later. And so the lawsuits are

put in place so that they have that, I think in the words it was put to me by an official, the battlefield is established for having the data to call upon where a poll watcher can say, we've seen something weird, we want to file an affidavit. And then later on, they're going to have that kind of legal framework to look back to and say, we need to file a lawsuit here and kind of reopen this.

So you mentioned earlier that there, I think, are 100,000 poll workers, monitors and lawyers who have been recruited for this effort. And I'm wondering, where are they all focused in swing states? Like if I, you know, when I vote in New York, will I see a bunch of poll watchers there? Or is it really like in Pennsylvania and in Michigan and places where we expect the results to be pretty close or kind of up in the air?

You can poll watch anywhere. I mean, I've been getting fundraising emails to poll watch in California. You could poll watch in Brooklyn. You could poll watch in Washington, D.C. I think the places where the RNC obviously is putting their focus is where their people are going to be able to do more. And so they're not necessarily bringing the armies to Oklahoma. But when it's seen as kind of a normal political act, which again, in this case, I think many of these poll watchers who they've recruited are still just

trying to get involved in a way that's completely, you know, out of interest and out of a desire to see how a process works. I don't think the average person attending these has some scheme to help Trump overturn the election or even thinks that he'll need to. I think we're really talking about the most radical version of the scenario where it would allow them to do that. But I think most of these people are just

You know, many of them were seniors who just want to go on Election Day and they don't want to go through the whole training to be poll workers, but they want to see in some way what's going on. OK, that's really interesting because, like, I feel like when you read about the poll watching efforts, it's always sort of being framed as like,

These men who were being deployed in swing states and you get the sense that they're all like hardcore MAGA Republicans. And I think that this is also sort of buttressed by what we saw in 2020 and 2022, where there were a number of instances where poll watchers were showing up armed.

And so I guess I'm wondering, like, is that more anomalous, like someone showing up armed and, you know, volunteering to be a poll watcher because it's their way of supporting the Trump campaign or like and then everyone else is just like a senior who wants to be like a good Samaritan?

Yeah, I think part of, you know, one of the characters in my story, Joseph Kirk, who's the election supervisor for a county in Georgia, he was telling me about how until 2020, they hadn't required poll watcher training. Just anyone could show up and say, I'm going to watch the polls. And that led to all sorts of confusion. In particular, one example I used was

a guy with an AR came to the poll and said, you know, hey, I'm here to help. What can I do? And because no one had trained anyone on how to poll watch, he hadn't technically broken any rule. Whereas this cycle, they've been much more intentional saying we have to train these people and, you know, we have to tell them don't bring a firearm. And even Michael Watley, the chairman of the RNC, was very clear. If you break those rules and you're a nuisance, they don't really want you doing it because then your reports won't even really be

If you, for example, go and stand between a voter and a voting machine, you know, you failed as a poll watcher. And so your report is not going to be taken super seriously. But I think we have heard a lot of examples of people who, you know, take the more, I

I suppose, dramatic version of it where they think that they're going to be able to find the fraud if they can just get a little bit closer. And so there are examples of people coming either in groups or coming armed. But in terms of the people who would take an official poll watching course through the RNC and who want to go to the polls, I don't think any of the... No one that I met in person, I think, had any nefarious or weird motives other than

a really amorphous sense that 2020 was stolen and that 2024 could go either way. But I didn't get the sense that there was any kind of notion of doing something that would be problematic. But I think what they worry about is the cases where even someone who wasn't trained decides to come and just get involved in the process in a way that could be, I think, a little bit more disturbing. But that certainly was not my impression from the trainings.

You mentioned earlier that the, you know, you went to the trainings, of course, and I think you described them earlier as kind of being like a boilerplate PowerPoint. And yet it does seem like this PowerPoint also contains slides that say, you know, don't bring your gun. And so I guess I'm wondering, what does the training actually consist of? Like, how long is it? And what is being taught? Or is it more just like people being given a list of things that they can't do? Yeah.

The training is almost like when you imagine taking like an online driver's ed course because you have to pass the test and you kind of run through rules that seem at once really simple and really obvious, but also a little bit confusing if you weren't normally engaging with that particular bureaucracy. And so it's things like, you know, don't wear your Trump mugshot shirt because you can't within 150 feet of a polling station have kind of political garb on.

I would say it kind of walks you through what you should see at a polling station on election day if everything is going correctly. But it also acknowledges that those can kind of vary depending on where you are. And so something like a sign not being put up on the door by 7 a.m.,

could later be seen as a problem that is big enough that you have to call a lawyer and say there was a problem with this polling station. And so I think, again, these very straightforward kind of notions of what the election day landscape should look like in person, if you've never seen it before, and then you see a PowerPoint on what it

ideally would look like. And then you go and it doesn't look exactly like that. I think you can imagine how it would play into your suspicion that things aren't being run properly. But I think, again, a large number of the people at the trainings are just sort of enraptured with the democratic process and want to see it up close and don't intend to go in and look for problems. And I think, in fact, many of them, because they can't bring their phones, I've been told people just get really bored and like they'll leave.

And so it's one of those funny things where we hear about these really kind of dramatic iterations of the process on the one occasion where someone comes armed to the polls. But the vast majority of people are standing there with pens and notebooks and kind of waiting for the day to end. And that's what it should look like. And that's why we have this procedure in place to make sure that everyone feels good.

So I'd love to talk more about what we can expect from poll watchers on Election Day and in the days after. But first, we're going to take another quick break. You'll hear more of the political scene from The New Yorker in just a moment. I'm David Remnick, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters. In print or here on the podcast, The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

So you were explaining that a lot of the poll-watching training kind of revolves around an explanation of what the rules are, where it's kind of trying to stop the poll watchers from actually getting in the way of people voting. But then I've also read about a number of red states that have enacted laws to remove guardrails around poll watchers and to make it easier for them to do their jobs. And so I guess I'm wondering to what extent—

poll watchers, you know, kind of have free reign versus, you know, they're really being restricted in certain ways. Like, I guess, can we expect poll watchers to be running wild on Election Day or do you think it's going to be pretty mundane?

I think part of having these trainings implemented in a state like Georgia where they didn't have them before is to make sure that things are just less unwieldy because people know more what the boundaries are. And it also lets the poll workers understand, you know, here's what you should reasonably expect them to.

to be doing. And there's a bit of a tension, I think, because for example, Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State always tells people, you know, it's better to become a poll worker because then you're really kind of, you're much more involved in the process. It's a much more extensive training. You're getting paid. You kind of feel complicit in what's going on. Whereas I think if you want to just show up and poll watch and say, oh, this is all kind of, I don't believe any of this. I have a problem. It's a bit more, I guess, cynical in his view. You

And so a lot of poll workers and poll managers who work really, really hard for $14 an hour to actually run our elections at the county level, I think they sometimes have a little bit of a raised eyebrow like, oh, the poll watchers are going to now come and breathe down our necks and just make it a little bit more annoying for us. But Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor who I spent time with, was saying, you know, this is such an important part of the process because it lets us tell people, you

We had this many people watching our work. And for example, in 2020, when there were tons of questions people had in Georgia about what happened, when he would get angry phone calls, he would say, call any of the poll watchers who were at my voting stations and then call me back if you still have a problem. And he said he got no phone calls back because it actually kind of allowed a lot of people who were a little bit suspicious about the election to

hear firsthand, "Oh, you know, it was all fine." And so his encouragement to poll workers was, "Be receptive to this because they're actually kind of complementing our work here. And ideally, we should all work hand in hand to make this run smoothly and to make everyone have faith in the process." And so I think there was a much more kind of sunny version of it presented to me when I went to Georgia and met with the poll station managers

and people who train poll watchers because they actually do see it as a helpful part of the process. I wouldn't expect pandemonium or chaos on election day in most cases just because I think, as with many other things, the vast majority of people are just kind of trying to do something pretty normal here.

Yeah. I mean, would you say that it's like a pretty even split between like Republicans and Democrats and independents who are poll watching? I mean, is there a sense of like it being like bipartisan?

There are meant to be an even split between Democrats and Republicans, and they're meant to work together. I think traditionally you wouldn't even come to the polling station and say, hi, I'm a Trump supporter. You would just say, I'm here to observe the process. I think what we saw after 2020 was, again, that all kind of fell apart when, for example, in Georgia, you had many people who

showed up for the vote counting and called themselves observers. Again, there was no training required. And for example, you had scenes where in one case, a woman saw a shredding truck in the parking lot of the polling station, and she became convinced the shredding truck was there for some really strange purpose. It turned out to be there just on complete happenstance to shred different documents. But she got in a hot with a friend. They said, okay, we have to follow this

shredding truck and they had a high-speed car chase with the shredding truck and they called the police and they called the FBI. And it was completely debunked that it even had anything to do with the election. But it still, I think, fed into this frenzy of ideas spreading online that, look what's happening. They're taking the ballots. They're removing them. They're shredding them. Your votes don't count. And so I think that's an example of an observer who went to go and make sure that things were

looked okay to her, kind of getting really out of control and calling law enforcement and the FBI. And then I think she was kind of retweeted by one of Trump's lawyers saying, look what's happening down in Georgia. And so you see how even one person observing and not completely following the rules or understanding can lead to a whole slew of problems. In another case, there were a mother and daughter pair

poll working together and they were passing each other ginger mints, which observers mistook for USB drives. And they thought, you know, the entire result had to be called into question. And those two women received tons of death threats. They were, you know, it's become a much bigger case, but you've seen how one person mistaking a mint for a USB drive can lead to four years of harassment and threats for a mother and daughter just trying to help

do the democratic process, again, for basically minimum wage. And so I think you can't understate the outliers who don't want to do it properly. But I think most people don't have those same nefarious intentions. Absolutely. And, you know, those poll watchers getting death threats kind of raises an interesting dynamic here, which is that, you know, we have examples of

poll watchers seeming threatening themselves. You know, like in 2022 when an armed poll watcher in Texas followed some poll workers into a ballot counting location. According to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, 38% of poll workers nationwide were threatened in 2020 over their work, even though this work is meant to be kind of this straightforward, just standing around watching people vote. And so I'm wondering if you expect this trend to continue

continue? I mean, have you seen any effort from RNC organizers to kind of curb these threats of violence or to get people prepared for them at least? Well, what we've seen from election officials who, again, at the county level run this election and, you know, are completely, they're instrumental in how this process unfolds. We've seen them both give people access, much more access than they had in 2020 to kind of

play off the idea that if we have more transparency, then surely people can't have so many problems. So, you know, in Arizona, there was, I think, a $32 million new election center built with tons and tons of walls of windows. So as many people as want to come and see can safely observe. But at the same time, I think with more transparency can come

more of a sense of conspiracy. And so as they're investing in those measures of sort of radical transparency, they're also bringing in, you have to go through security, you have snipers outside in Maricopa County. They have all sorts of, you know, in one case, the Department of Defense doctor diagnosed tons of election workers with PTSD just for going near voting centers, just remembering what 2020 was like. And so I think we've seen an incredible kind of

psychic torment from 2020, even if the cases, you know, statistically are not as many as we might think. The sort of hangover from all of those scenes that we saw of just sort of contentious behavior between people who traditionally are just

county level workers who are paid by the hour to do something that they used to think of almost as banal suddenly are seen as this kind of threat from within to a process that people feel is no longer operating properly. And so I think in advance of 2024, there's been a lot of effort to both put in place more security and more transparency, but at the same time, they're

as you've seen and as we've all heard, they've really ramped up the language of Democrats are going to cheat. They'll do anything. Don't trust anything that you don't see up close. And so it's impossible to see exactly how those two will balance out. But I do think for a number of poll workers and poll watchers,

that you hear testimony from, there's just a really heightened sense of anxiety going into the election season. And even from voters who, you know, with all these lawsuits filed about potential non-citizens voting, just an average guy will come in to the election office and say, wait, am I still registered to vote?

Have I been taken off the rolls? And so I think the process has already been in some ways a little bit subverted by people who just feel this kind of sense of aggravation about what's going to happen. Am I even part of this process anymore? Absolutely. I know that most of your reporting has been focused on like the RNC's efforts in the lead up to the election with, you know, recruiting poll watchers and kind of getting ready for, you know, potential lawsuits. But

What is your sense of what the DNC is doing in terms of like counter efforts, like, you know, in terms of preparing for litigation filed by the Trump team or even I mean, is there a world in which they're recruiting poll watchers to just so that you have like watchers to watch the poll watchers? Maybe that's a little silly, but, you know, Democrats surely care about election integrity as well. Yeah.

And so I guess I'm wondering if you've seen anything kind of coordinated on the Democratic side.

One thing that I think is unique in this process, you know, in terms of 2024, is that we've seen not just the RNC, but other sort of far right organizations also getting involved in the process. So even, for example, Cleta Mitchell, who is the head of the Election Integrity Network, she's encouraged people not just to poll watch, but also to become poll workers so that they can watch the chicanery or you could vote.

be part of it yourself if you really kind of put yourself as someone who is within the system. And so I think what's been most notable this election cycle is how many of the organizations like the Election Integrity Network are getting involved and saying, make sure that you

are in a place where on election day you can report, even if you want to challenge someone's voter registration, if you want to challenge the eligibility of someone's vote, they're really encouraging people from the grassroots, again, who were turned off of the election results last time, to come in and take part in the system so that they can themselves either influence it directly or by speaking about it to lawyers. And so I think in that way, no, the Democrats, I don't think, have similar efforts to counteract

kind of slightly push the boundaries of what the process is meant to be, but they will have poll watchers.

And they, of course, will have their own lawyers who will be there to respond as needed to these filings. And if this does become a legal battle, it's not like it's going to only be the Republicans. But I think they're the ones who are setting the stage before we've even counted the votes to say, we probably think we might want to do this. And so I think in that way, it's notable just by virtue of the strategy they're kind of pushing out to their base about, you know, it's already calling into question a result that we don't yet know.

So Trump might be the only candidate who's making vast preparations ahead of time to contest the election. But you also hear Republican pundits speculating that Harris is ready to challenge the outcome of the election, too, particularly if it's extremely close. And so I guess I'm wondering what your sense is of whether

Whether we might have a contested outcome no matter what, unless one of these candidates just wins in a total landslide. Last night when I was at an 11th hour of faith leaders summit in North Carolina where Trump was speaking, I interviewed a man who said no matter what,

who wins and no matter what the results are, everyone should have tons of toilet paper and tons of ammunition for whatever comes after November 5th. And so I do think there's a sense of, again, just really generalized uncertainty that makes even someone who comes to a Trump rally say, whichever way it goes, there's going to be chaos. And whether or not that's true, I think, again, it contributes to this encroaching sense of kind of

just amorphous dread people have about the election not ending on election night, which then kind of immediately conjures what we lived through in 2020. And so, again, I wouldn't want to speculate about different outcomes and how they, you know, kind of war game how they might play out. But I think just the notion that on both sides, everyone's already sort of saying, you know, this may drag on for a long time feels unique. And then I would also say on the

In terms of what happens after November 5th, scholars, for the most part that I spoke to, I think no one has said that they're confident that any of this infrastructure is going to be able to necessarily get Trump a result that he wants.

if he doesn't win on election night, I mean, of course, he could wake up the next day and just say, you know, I'm going to go to Monte Carlo. It's fine. I'm done with all of this. We don't know what's going to happen. But there is the sense that even if legally the result can't end up being changed, it could be like in 2020 where

look what that led to with January 6th, in which, you know, four years later, our election cycle is completely governed by kind of the hangover of the sense that we have to speak about election integrity, as it were, in the RNC's words. And so I think there can be a tremendous sort of civic and cultural impact, whether or not legally any of this ends up going as far as they would like it to. Well, thank you so much, Antonia. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me.

Antonia Hitchens is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. You can read her latest piece, Inside the Republican National Committee's Poll-Watching Army, on newyorker.com. This has been The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett. This episode was produced by Sam Egan and edited by Gianna Palmer with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton-Brown. Enjoy your week, and we'll see you next Wednesday.

My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

You know, for us at In the Dark, we're paying equal attention to the reporting and the storytelling. And we felt a real kinship with The New Yorker, like the combination of the deeply reported stories that The New Yorker is known for, but also the quality of those stories, the attention to narrative. If I could give you only one reason to subscribe to The New Yorker, it would be... Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for, but...

I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue as a New Yorker. You know, like you have poetry, you have theater reviews, you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great, but I haven't even mentioned like

The other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read. You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we're so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe. And so to me, it's like I can't imagine not reading these writers.

You can have all the journalism, the fiction, the film, book, and TV reviews, all the cartoons, just by going right now to newyorker.com slash dark. Plus, there's an incredible archive, a century's worth of award-winning work just waiting for you. That's newyorker.com slash dark. And thanks. From PR.