How to contest an election: Partisan Poll Watchers and Lawfare in the United States

Poll watchers are expected to enhance electoral integrity and transparency by monitoring polling stations and reporting misconduct. In the United States, however, partisan poll watchers have increasingly acted in "bad faith”, leveraging their perceived authority not to strengthen, but to undermine, electoral processes. This paper examines how the practices of partisan poll watchers, together with electoral lawyers, have transformed observation into a tool of lawfare and electoral contestation, producing both legal challenges and public narratives of fraud that destabilize confidence in elections. Empirically, we draw on original qualitative data, combining semi-structured interviews with electoral lawyers and partisan poll watchers with an analysis of high-profile U.S. court cases rooted in pollwatching claims. This approach allows us to trace how local observation practices are strategically translated into national-level disputes over electoral legitimacy. We show how the partisan observation of electoral ‘truth’ can be weaponized to delegitimize elections. We find that the massive increase and transformation of partisan poll watching practices - particularly on the Republican side - has amplified electoral litigation, generated hostile dynamics in polling stations, and fostered narratives of systemic fraud. Our analysis demonstrates how poll watching, once a mechanism of democratic accountability, has become central to the politics of electoral contestation. Co-authored with Peter Verpoorten (verpoorten_peter@phd.ceu.edu), Central European University