Texas voter fraud activist leads closed-door poll watcher training at Arlington church

A church in Arlington on Tuesday hosted a poll watcher training session organized by electoral fraud activist Laura Pressley of Austin.

Pressley refused to allow a Star-Telegram reporter to observe the workshop held inside a cordoned off section of the gym at Grace Community Church, at 801 West Bardin Road. She said it was only open to election judges, clerks and election watchers.

A church staff member and a session attendee later blocked the reporter from entering the cordoned off area to ask Pressley for comment, but she spoke to the Star-Telegram in the church parking lot after the session.

“We’re appointing watchers by candidates, and they’re the ones who are going to get the folders and have the appointments, there’s a lot of details,” she said when asked why outside observers were not allowed in. “It was transparent to people who want to be watchers. That’s who it was focused on.”

Attendees were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, according to a post for the session on the Eventbrite website.

Who is Laura Pressley?

Pressley has made a name for herself as a contentious elections integrity advocate ever since she lost a 2014 Austin City Council election. She contested the results of that election, taking it all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, which ultimately rejected the suit in 2019.

She has also challenged a 2019 referendum in Gillespie County over the removal of fluoride in the city of Fredricksburg’s water. Both the city vote and Pressley’s legal challenge were unsuccessful. Pressley has also espoused 9/11 conspiracy theories and has been a frequent guest on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Info Wars. Experts have said that her idea to consecutively number paper ballots could actually facilitate electoral fraud by making voters more easily identifiable.

Who attended the closed-door session?

Tarrant County GOP Assistant Secretary Rosalie Escobedo said she was attending the session to get updated on recent changes to the law concerning how watchers can behave at the polls.

“There were some rule changes not too long ago, so I want to make sure that I’m fully aware of everything,” she said in an interview ahead of the session.

Having served as an election judge and clerk in the past, she has attended other “high-level watcher training” sessions, but this was her first put on by Pressley. “From my understanding, hers goes pretty in-depth,” she said.

Think tanks spanning the political spectrum — from the conservative Cato Institute to the progressive Brennan Center for Justice and the somewhere-in-between Brookings Institution — have refuted claims that widespread voter fraud exists in U.S. elections.

Escobedo, however, remains concerned about election integrity issues due to the size of Tarrant County’s population at 2.2 million.

“I think we’re a pretty big county, right? We’re in the millions in terms of registered voters, and so anytime you have that number, there’s room for error,” she said. There were 1.2 million registered voters in Tarrant County as of 2022, according to the most recent data from the Texas Secretary of State.

David Rakes serves on the Tarrant County GOP Voter Roll Committee and is also an election judge.

“I thought I would see what they had to say,” he said in an interview before the session. “They’re training poll watchers as well, so if somebody shows up to watch, I want to be aware of what they’re being told.”

He added that “election integrity is definitely necessary” before an organizer pulled him into the church building.

Messages left with the Tarrant County GOP leadership were not immediately returned.

Tarrant County Democratic Party Executive Director Candace Sublett said her office was not notified of the session.

“I would have liked to have been made aware, but it’s not surprising,” she said in a phone interview.

What can election watchers do at the polls?

Such training sessions and the election day actions for which they prepare attendees are less about ensuring integrity in Texas elections than they are about voter intimidation, according to Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nongovernmental organization that works to expand voting rights.

While he was unaware of what Pressley’s session was to cover, he said in a phone interview that such groups “seem to be going out of their way to use poll watchers to intimidate or at least harass voters of color in different parts of the states.”

Gutierrez pointed to a 2021 video of a Harris County Republican Party presentation in which a man identifying with the county’s Republican Party said that they were trying to recruit an “army” of 10,000 poll workers to fight voter fraud.

In the video, the presenter can be seen using a cursor to point to a predominantly white part of Houston. He says that they were looking to recruit people with “the confidence and courage to come down in here” — moving the cursor to predominantly Black and Brown communities — to fight voter fraud.

Gutierrez expressed concern over the lack of transparency of Tuesday’s training session in Arlington.

“If groups are kicking people out of their training, you have to wonder what they’re training people on,” he said.

A poll watcher’s guide issued by the Elections Division of the Texas Secretary of State Elections Division updated in August 2023 states that watchers are allowed to “sit or stand near enough to see and hear the election officers conducting the observed activity, except as otherwise prohibited by Chapter 33” of the Texas Election Code.

Watchers are allowed to examine ballots before they are deposited in the ballot box, the code states, but they are not allowed to “be present at the voting station when a voter is preparing the voter’s ballot or is being assisted by a person of the voter’s choice.”

Gutierrez, of Common Cause Texas, said that lack of specificity in the code makes the rules governing election watchers ultimately unclear.

“A lot of what poll watchers can and can’t do is a little murky at the moment,” he said. “The wording is sufficiently vague to make it uncertain.”