Updated October 11, 2024 at 05:00 AM ET
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Inside a small church in rural Michigan, a young man in a brown suit stood before a group of roughly 50 supporters of former President Donald Trump one recent evening with an ask:
"What I need are people on the ground, I need troops in the trenches. I need poll challengers, I need poll workers," said Carter Chain, the regional director for Trump's election integrity team. "We're going to do our bit to make sure that everything goes according to plan without a hitch."
Many Americans are going into this presidential election still convinced that their 2020 vote for Trump was stolen. More than half say they're concerned or very concerned there will be voter fraud, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. This enduring sentiment stems, in large part, from Trump's repeated claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 despite dozens of court cases that found no evidence of this — including by Trump-appointed judges.
He and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have never publicly said they would accept the election results if it doesn't go their way come Election Day.
It is against this backdrop that Chain urges the members of this far-right faction of the Republican Party in Hillsdale County called America First to sign up to watch the voting process, at one point taking aim at laws that expanded voting rights in the state by zeroing in on mail-in ballots.
When his mention of Michigan's Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson didn't prompt a big reaction from the crowd, he pushed for more.
"I was expecting a collective boo," he told the crowd. They responded in kind.
Benson is a frequent target for election deniers. In the last four years, she's been threatened, armed protesters showed up at her house and this year a SWAT team descended on her home after a hoax call.
This story is part of "We, The Voters," NPR's election series reported from the seven swing states that will most likely decide the 2024 election.
The dynamic in Hillsdale, where America First split with the county Republican Party in the last couple years after it lost its battle for control, is a microcosm for the country.
There are the traditional Republicans who buy into the democratic process that has led to peaceful transitions of power for decades and others who are convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that state institutions can no longer be trusted.
That lack of trust is on display at this quintessential small town monthly gathering of America First members.
Outside the meeting hall, Trump campaign T-shirts sat on a table. One carried the iconic photo of his bloodied face after he was shot at a Pennsylvania rally and his words "FIGHT…FIGHT…FIGHT!"
Fliers read: "SWAMP THEM WITH VOTES! MAKE OUR VICTORY TOO BIG TO RIG!"
There was food, a raffle, speakers that included an advocate for the homeless, a homesteader and a book author who survived a terrible car accident.
This group sees itself as the true protectors of conservative values, but it has a reputation for being conspiratorial and confrontational. An early leader chartered a couple buses for Hillsdale residents to go to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 for the "Stop the Steal" rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol.
"Our group that you're seeing here today is a group of Republicans that weren't happy with the Republican Party," the newly appointed chairman of America First, Josh Gritzmaker, explained after the meeting. "We got involved, got off the sidelines and wanted to be part of the political process."
Gritzmaker has his own suspicions about the elections.
"I'm on the fence about it because I've seen too much funny business going on to say [Trump] lost 100%," he said, sharing a story about a couple ballots that showed up at his house in 2020 for the former residents. "But then you also see stuff where, well, I don't have any solid proof. I don't see the court's ruling in that favor. I don't see the whistleblowers that we were promised to step forward."
Some America First members will likely volunteer to be poll watchers in larger cities in Michigan, he said.
"If my folks go in and volunteer and they're poll watchers, if they come back and say 'Hey, Josh, it was clean. It was completely clean,' I'm going to trust their boots on the ground statements more than anything else on TV," he said.
A GOP-led probe by the Michigan Senate's oversight committee concluded in 2021 that no fraud had taken place in the election and said allegations about it were baseless, the Associated Press reported.
When asked, almost every person in this group said they don't trust this year's vote will be fair and almost all still believe the last election was stolen.
The target of a lot of their ire is the local chief deputy clerk and elections director, Abe Dane.
We met him at a local public high school preparing a presentation for Amanda Mann's civics class for juniors and seniors.
She spends her days teaching teens how to discern what is fact-based and what is not. She teaches them about echo chambers and confirmation bias online.
On this day, Dane was there to show them how voting works as a way to pull back the curtain on a process he even had questions about before he became an election worker.
"I'm trying to allow them to go through the same steps that I did because I am a Republican and I did not understand why Trump lost when it appeared he was winning when I went back to bed in 2020," he said.
He highlighted for the class a lot of common conspiracies that circulate among Americans.
"How many of you guys have heard about someone saying there's thousands of dead people on the voter rolls and dead people are voting. You heard that before?" he asked the class.
The teens nodded.
Then he explained how hundreds of township clerks, county clerks and city clerks all have access to each other's voter rolls through the qualified voter file.
"We can all see each other's voters. Do you think it would be hard to hide thousands of dead voters and to actually have them vote?" he asked. "Because every one of these has to be tied to a registered voter in the system. So it would be difficult to do that, right?"
More nodding followed.
"There's a lot of accountability."
He ticked off other points of suspicion.
Absentee ballots.
He has the class try to forge each other's signatures.
"Sometimes it can be pretty good, but there are always differences," he told the students, adding that signature verification will almost always detect the forgery.
There are bipartisan teams for ballot processing, under rules set by the Michigan Department of State.
Locked drop boxes with video monitoring.
And if someone is caught double voting it's a felony.
Then the students took part in a mock election with a voting machine tabulator Dane had set up. He told the class the machines are tested before every election and the public can come watch.
"We have a big vault, cinder block walls that are like two feet or more thickness and a big old, like, 1800s metal door vault with a fancy combination on it," he said. "So old technology can still be pretty cool and secure in that way."
The students filed out and he packed up.
With the election just weeks away, there's a lot on his mind, including the amount of scrutiny he and other election workers are already under.
"The pressure keeps me up at night," he said. "I have an app on my phone, a Post-it note app, and I'll wake up at three in the morning and I'll put something on there before I forget to check on it when I get to the office."
He said he knows that innocent mistakes could lead to a new wave of conspiracy theories about voting. So he spends his time answering residents' questions, even from America First members who he said come in with cameras to try to get him to admit to fraud. He shared videos.
The chair of America First, Gritzmaker, said he wasn't aware of any members doing that.
"We're all trying to make sure things are done accurately," Dane said. "But we're all human and we know it's such a complicated system that there absolutely will be mistakes. But they will be explained and there will be a reason for them … and in the end, the number of people that voted and the number of ballots that we have is going to balance and match."
Some election workers in the county are a bit worried about Election Day. He said that's especially true for women who outnumber male poll workers in Hillsdale. There's one polling station in this rural area that's off an isolated dirt road and emergency response times can be more than 15 minutes, so he's in touch with law enforcement just in case.
And he's not alone.
A survey conducted this year by the Brennan Center for Justice found that 92% of local election officials have increased election security over the last four years. That includes updating emergency plans at polling places and coordinating better with law enforcement.
Now in rural areas like Hillsdale County that type of beefing up is limited. The courthouse doesn't even have a metal detector at the door. But the election director Dane thinks the nature of small towns where everyone knows each other will make it hard for anyone to be anything more than a little rude.
"Most of these people, when they get to a precinct and they're dealing with the clerk, they're dealing with their grandma. They're face-to-face with their grandma, basically," he said. "They're from their own community."
Those include grandmothers like Anita Coe and Ruth Sanders. They're friends and will be working at a small polling station come Election Day.
Sanders isn't too worried about it, but Coe is a bit anxious because of the rhetoric and suspicions.
"I just hope we don't get people coming in that have their party's signature on them because then we have to kind of confront them and tell them 'you can't wear that shirt in here' or 'you can't wear that hat in here,'" she said. "Leave it outside or change it inside out or whatever you have to do not to affect somebody else's vote and I feel like they could be kind of confrontational."
There's no back entrance at this polling place and the windows of this nearly 150-year-old train depot are painted shut. So they don't have good plans in the event something goes wrong.
"I guess we could break a window, but I don't know how feasible that would be," Sanders told Coe.
"I feel like, you know, we'd have to lift each other out. I guess you would just duck and hide. You know, you run to the bathroom and lock the door and hide," Coe said.
Neither one thinks they'll have to use these plans. It's the days after that concern them.
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