The Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) is training thousands of volunteer attorneys to monitor November’s elections in key battleground states, with training sessions in Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

“We’re kind of like the National Guard that deploys the troops, and somebody else commands them,” says RNLA President Michael Thielen.

The Trump campaign, he says, is in charge of the lawyers who will be on the ground in the battleground states.

In April, the campaign and the Republican National Committee announced they would have 100,000 poll watchers and lawyers in key states during the 2024 election to monitor testing of voting machines, early voting, Election Day voting, mail ballot processing, and the post-election canvas, plus any audits and recounts.

They call it “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.”

On Sept. 30, RNC Co-chair Lara Trump said the party had exceeded its goal and had recruited 200,000 people.

The focus is on battleground states, with 18 states included on the RNC-run website, protecthevote.com.

The issues are not expected to be as acute as in 2020.

Twenty-seven states have passed laws to improve election security since 2021, according to the Heritage Foundation, and three – Alabama, Virginia, and Texas – have removed thousands of noncitizens from the voter rolls.

Where states have fallen short, citizen activists have stepped in.

“I think we have better guardrails in place for processes and procedures, and better training overall,” says Marci McCarthy, chairwoman of the DeKalb County GOP in Georgia.

She spent the last few years building up a bipartisan “joint stakeholders group” to better secure elections in the county after the disaster of 2020, when she says poll workers traveled from polling places with bags of ballots alone or with random family members driving them, rather than riding in a car with another poll worker as required.

This year, as part of the new and improved process, they’ll have election night runners who have been deputized and who will ferry the paper ballots and the memory cards containing the electronic votes from the polling places to the county’s central counting location in a designated vehicle.

The ballots, she said, are to be sealed in a banker’s bag placed inside a pelican case with only the director of elections or the deputy able to open it, and only in the presence of observers. All memory cards must be counted, placed in a clear container, and walked down the hall with a police escort to be inserted into the tabulator.

“The amount of detail is incredible,” says McCarthy. “There’s still sh** that can go wrong, but that gives me confidence in the election.”

She’s also working with the RNC and the Trump campaign to get poll watchers trained. In 2020, poll watchers had no real training, she says. Adjudication of votes went on for days, with no real controls.

But the biggest difference in Georgia, says McCarthy, is the number of absentee ballots. This year, most people there are voting in person, with 1,504,332 having voted early-in-person by Monday at 3:30 p.m., compared to 1,010,162 by the same time and day in 2020.

In Pennsylvania, the Real Clear Politics average of polls shows the race is a virtual dead heat, with Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris by less than 1 percent.

Linda Kerns, the RNC Election Integrity counsel for Pennsylvania, says she’s optimistic that poll watchers won’t be shut out of polling places or central count centers as they were in 2020.

“I think these boards of election realize that being secretive really doesn’t look very good,” she says, referring to videos that went viral showing election workers taping up glass windows so that people couldn’t observe the counting of ballots.

In September, there was a special election that was a good test run for the general election.

“It didn’t look anything like it did in 2020,” she says. “We were able to watch and see the life cycle of the ballot.”

Election laws in Pennsylvania have also been tightened.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court recently ruled there must be a date on the outside of ballot envelopes, and if there’s no date, the ballots cannot be counted. The court also affirmed that ballots must be received by county election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Both mark a major change from 2020, when ballots were counted if they had no date and if they were sent after the election had already taken place.

“Compared to what it was in 2020, it’s infinitely better,” said Thielen.

The presence of so many Republican poll watchers and attorneys is likely to make a difference, also.

“If you have somebody of some authority and credibility to call people out, you can usually affect what happens,” says Jim Bopp, a prominent election lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign in 2020.