With the election fast approaching, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has stepped up his call for his supporters to become poll watchers to watch for, and document, illegal activity. He even has set up a page on his website for people to sign up. But MSNBC’s Al Sharpton has had it with Trump’s call for poll-watchers, claiming they are there to intimidate minorities. “How concerned are you about voter intimidation tactics in this election,” he asked Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, as he warned about militias backing Trump.
“…in the last several months, as there has been this discussion about the election being rigged, and about sending people out to do poll watching, our fears have absolutely and exponentially increased,” Ifill responded. Ifill continued by saying that her organization takes voter intimidation by Trump-backing groups very seriously. She did admit that they had a right to be poll watchers, “the right to watch outside the polls, of course, is the right of a citizen to stand outside the polls and to watch.” But Ifill quickly turned around and slammed Trump supporters for being too ignorant on voting rights:
But when it becomes intimidation, when people are suggesting that there are certain people who are not eligible to vote; when you're not bothering to educate those poll watchers about the protections of the Voting Rights Act and other federal laws, then I think you're creating a recipe for disaster on Election Day.
Sharpton followed her up by claiming that Trump’s poll watching efforts are “illegal” and stem from unfounded and “biased” paranoia.
From there, Ifill continued to rant about how Trump’s poll watchers were too ignorant for the job, before touting her own organization’s poll watching efforts. “Let me be clear, I'm very proud of my civil rights colleagues. We will all be out there poll watching. We’ve been doing this for a while. We kind of know what we're doing,” she praised.
The MSNBC host backed Ifill up with high praise of his own, and claimed that the her work and the work of other left-leaning poll watchers was “nonpartisan.” That’s right, according to Sharpton, the right-leaning poll watchers are out there because of the myth voter fraud with the goal of intimidating and suppressing voter turnout, while leftists organizations are “nonpartisan” election protectors.