During a March webinar, Bill Ely pulled up a map of Harris County while presenting the local Republican Party’s ambitious plan for the 2022 midterms: building an “army” of 10,000 conservative election monitors. Ely, a local Tea Party leader who heads the committee within the Harris County GOP dedicated to ballot security, pointed to the northwest Houston suburb where he lives, where “almost seven out of 10 homes are Republican.” Ely stressed to other party leaders on the call the importance of recruiting more election monitors from neighborhoods like his, then he dragged the cursor down to the heart of the city. Pointing to majority Black and brown neighborhoods, Ely said the party needs people with “the confidence and courage to come down in here in these areas where we really need poll workers, because this is where the fraud is occurring.”
Later in the hour-long presentation, discussing the need to monitor busy urban polling places, Ely arrived at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, a Third Ward hub for civil rights activists that once hosted Martin Luther King Jr. and is home to one of the county’s oldest and most active voting precincts. Garnet Coleman, a Texas House member and Black Democrat who lives around the corner from the church, called the plan the latest example of a long-term strategy by Tea Party activists to target minority voters. Coleman told the Observer that he’s seen them at precincts in his district, crowding and challenging voters at their booths, delaying or disrupting the pace of casting ballots, and sometimes even carrying guns. “It’s been done before and it is disruptive because you have people standing over voters as they try to exercise their right to vote,” he said.
The Harris County GOP’s plan to recruit thousands of people for a new “Election Integrity Brigade” was first publicly unveiled in an excerpt of the webinar published this month by the progressive group Common Cause Texas. The Observer separately obtained an unredacted copy of the training video that Republicans posted on Dropbox on March 10. The plan dovetails with the growing conservative fixation on voter fraud, which extensive research has repeatedly shown to be incredibly rare. While Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election drove his right-wing base to mob violence this year, Harris County Republicans have long been focused on “election integrity.” Over the past decade, as the region has gone from swing territory to solidly blue, local conservatives have pushed for voter roll purges and tighter monitoring of elections.
