More concrete, said Pitcavage, are the plans of the Oath Keepers, a militia movement group formed in 2009, that has thousands of active members drawn largely from the ranks of former military, law enforcement, intelligence and first responders and a track record of mustering heavily-armed members in public places.
The group issued a statement last month claiming that James O’Keefe’s latest Project Veritas video provided evidence of “a well-orchestrated campaign of criminal vote fraud on an industrial scale,” and urging members “to form up incognito intelligence-gathering and crime spotting teams and go out into public on Election Day, dressed to blend in with the public.” The group said it believed most vote-rigging was “leftist” but that it would seek to expose fraud committed by anyone. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law would ask the Justice Department to investigate the group’s Election Day plans.
Stone, who first began advising Trump in the ’80s and describes the alt-right as “the new mainstream,” has also come under scrutiny for his Election Day plans. The Republican operative — less concerned with fraud committed by voters than with vote-rigging by elections officials —is organizing a volunteer exit-polling operation that he hopes will reach 7,000 precincts he sees as prone to rigging because of the voting methods employed and their one-party control. Stone said the precincts targeted included 2,000 in Philadelphia as well as some Republican-controlled areas in Ohio, though he declined to specify where. “If I told you I would be warning the [Republican Gov. John] Kasich machine,” he said.
Stone said he planned to present his findings to Trump and that he would consider any deviation of more than 2 percent between his exit polls and the posted precinct totals to be suspicious, citing the State Department’s standard for monitoring foreign elections.
But it is doubtful that a hastily assembled volunteer effort could result in reliable exit polling data, and Potok warned, “Anything he would produce would merely create more conflict and not lead us any closer to the truth of what happens out there.”
