Grassroots Election Integrity Efforts Go Full Scale This Midterms

Grassroots election integrity efforts have risen to a new level for this year’s midterms.

With over 4,500 poll watchers and election workers trained, the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election integrity pilot program was a success, according to the Virginia Fair Election Coalition (VFE), a consortium of over 20 mostly conservative nonprofits.

Similar efforts are occurring in more states, with more volunteers contributing their time and unique expertise. All are laboring with the same goal in mind: a fair and transparent election.

“Across the country, people are waking up to how they can work as citizens to restore faith in the outcome of our elections,” Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chairwoman of Tea Party Patriots Action (TPP Action), a conservative grassroots advocacy group with about 3 million members nationwide, told The Epoch Times.

Following the template created by VFE in 2021, TPP Action has trained over 7,500 people on election integrity in multiple states, according to Martin. The group held state tours in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to offer election-related training sessions, including poll watching in urban and rural areas.

Based in Georgia, TPP Action also partnered with fair election coalitions in many states and participated in election integrity summits in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

The table below contains an incomplete tally of the coalitions’ work results.

“Volunteers are not just complaining about a problem but are taking the time to learn how to solve problems and then taking action based on that training,” Martin added.

‘It Impacts Everything’

Elizabeth in Texas’ Travis County, which covers Austin, is one such volunteer.

She had heard of election irregularities before the 2020 election but didn’t seriously look into these issues until after Nov. 3, 2020, when everyday citizens brought up their concerns about the vote and how it was handled and provided witness accounts. Through this process, she got to know other Texans who shared these worries.

Now Elizabeth is an overall coordinator of the “Texas team,” an election integrity task force consisting of 70 members, with between two to four representatives per county in 31 Texas counties. That’s about 12 percent of the 254 counties in the state.

Elizabeth is focusing on current and future elections because “people cannot talk about [the] 2020 [election] with any objectivity,” She told The Epoch Times. Elizabeth did not want her last name disclosed, fearing for her privacy and safety.

Her team is decentralized and doesn’t have an official name yet, she said. Different subgroups focus on different initiatives, including recruiting and training poll watchers, door-to-door canvassing to validate voter roll data, filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and persuading counties to stop using voting machines.

Elizabeth left her management consultant job in 2014 so that she could spend more time with her son, now 16. But since 2021, she has devoted herself to election integrity efforts.

“If we don’t have secure, well-run elections, then there’s nothing else that works properly in the country,” Elizabeth said. “It impacts everything—this