There have been an endless number of signals that the Trump campaign is planning to lose the November election, and here's yet another: It is presently recruiting an army of some 50,000 volunteers to serve as "poll watchers" on Election Day, according to NBC News.
The joint effort between the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign includes a $20 million pot for legal battles to, ya know, contest the results of the election.
Poll watching is actually pretty commonplace, and both parties do it. What's unusual is the scale of the Trump camp's initiative along with the resources being devoted to it. Poll watchers sometimes serve to intimidate voters, particularly people of color, and could be used as a tool to suppress participation.
NBC reports that in some states, such as Michigan, poll watchers can actually challenge a person's voting eligibility, at which point the voter can be removed from the line and questioned about their citizenship, age, and residency.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, calls the Trump campaign poll watching recruits a "voter suppression war machine." It's all of a piece, she said, including Trump's constant and baseless voter fraud rants and the discriminatory laws passed almost exclusively by GOP lawmakers in red states.
Based on experience, the targets of Trump’s poll watching army will very obviously be voters of color. But the goal isn't to simply suppress turnout and influence the election. The Trump campaign is also clearly laying the groundwork for questioning the results in states where voters tell them something they don't like.