Since it’s now quite clear that Donald Trump and various federal law enforcement thugs who serve Donald Trump will be stalking our voters at polling places and threatening them, what if we raised a (legal) army?
In 2008 and again in 2012 I registered with the Obama campaign and OFA, respectively, to act as a volunteer legal election monitor. We were recruited, our credentials were checked and we then attended two days of training in various locations throughout Ohio. I trained in Toledo and was lucky enough to get a very good, very successful personal injury lawyer (and obsessive perfectionist) as my teacher in 2008. He volunteered. In 2012 OFA paid another very good lawyer to act as lead, this one was from the Lawyers Guild, which is a Lefty legal society.
In Ohio there was a process to be admitted to a polling place ahead of time, which involved filing a (prewritten) motion and order we were given that we then filed in the local Court of Common Pleas and, when the file stamped order was returned, submitted to each polling place on election day. We then appeared at random polling places throughout election day, smiled, introduced ourselves, handed our order to the pollworker at the door, then sat quietly and observed. This went on all over the state, all day.
What if the Democratic Party planned and funded an effort along these lines but much, much bigger, now? Hire a highly qualified lead who is ready to litigate, one litigator per million population in each state? So Ohio gets 12 and Florida gets 22, like that. Hire the lead now and the lead can recruit and train their team. Prewrite “placeholder” motions for each state which can be filed immediately by the local lawyer and then picked up and supplemented if there’s trouble when the lead litigators get there? Pay the leads decently so you get very good people, ask fancy firms if you “borrow” a litigator lead for three months, recruit retired USA’s, etc.. Pitch it as “democracy” but don’t cheap out – it’s about 350 -400 lead lawyers nationwide, so they could afford to make it worth their while.
We’d be essentially creating a privately paid DOJ civil rights enforcement team, and I think Trump and Republicans just knowing this group were out there would act as a deterrent, especially if we were able to recruit some people who are well known litigators in their respective legal communities. If we paid 350 litigator leads a good round sum (but not even close to their hourly) for 3 months work that’s about 70 million. Maybe they need a budget for staff, so add that, we’re at 100 million. Just to give you an idea of how much money we raise, Sherrod Brown raised 7.3 million in one quarter in 2025. We don’t have billionaire donors, but we have plenty of multimillionaire voters – create a segregated fund for just this purpose.
The Dem base, especially the African American base who are specifically targeted in voter suppression schemes, would absolutely love this and our litigators would get media requests, they’re professional talkers, after all… it could really take off as media/voter education on voting systems.
Let’s invest 100 million in our voters and make an alt DOJ civil rights division, from scratch. Let’s really show the base some love, get them some bulldog advocates to show their teeth and scare off the Trump thugs.
