RNC stops in central Ohio to train poll watchers

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- The national Republican party, is making stops across the country to train volunteers ahead of this election as “poll-watchers.” On Friday afternoon, the Republican National Committee made one of those stops in Columbus.

Michael Whatley, chairman of the RNC, said their goal is to have 5,000 trained poll watchers throughout Ohio and in every other battleground state.

“I think what it's going to do is we're going to have a conversation on election integrity and how important it is," Whatley said. "And we're going to make sure that everybody understands that we have rules in place, that that we're going to have observers in place so that they can feel very confident in the outcome of the election."

Poll watchers are separate from poll workers, who go through training by county boards of elections. The training by the RNC and Ohio Republican Party on Friday was not open to media, but Whatley said Ohioans, as well all others being trained as poll watchers, will learn what to look out for and how to report something.

“I really think in any case is going to be unique and it's going to be different. But if this works right, it's going to be a very boring exercise for people to be observers because 99.5% of the time there are no issues,” he said. “But sometimes there are people who get too close to the machines, there are people who want to help voters, there are people who are coming in to vote who should not be voting, that maybe they're not registered.”

He said he is not concerned about this being voter intimidation.

“One of the things we focus on in the training sessions is making sure that we respect the process, we respect the poll workers and we respect, most importantly, the voters,” he said.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said while Ohio is already the gold standard with bi-partisan poll workers across the state, he supports this idea, saying an extra layer of verification can’t hurt. 

“The best solution to making sure that everybody plays by the rules to watch each other. When we have audits, people tend not to play games with the financial books. It's the same principle,” he said. “I would also add that in Ohio, all of the machines are air gapped from the internet. So, some of the scare stories we've seen are simply not an issue here in Ohio. We have strong election integrity, and with the initiative that the chairman is talking about, we're going to continue to have strong election integrity here in Ohio.”

“We want to work with the Democrats on this to be poll watchers, poll workers and work together on this because who can quarrel to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat? Who can quarrel with that? No one can,” former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

The Ohio Democratic Party did not respond to NBC4's request for comment.