First, before we get to the meat of this, he’s wrong about Nevada. “Trump’s remarks … wrongly implied that there is no signature verification of mail-in ballots,” the Nevada Independent pointed out a few weeks ago. “AB4 details a process by which election officials check the signature of a voter on a mail-in ballot against the voter signature they have in government records.” It’s amazing that the president of the United States would repeatedly lead Americans to believe that a swing state isn’t bothering to verify the authenticity of ballots it receives in the mail. Amazing, but not surprising.

Anyway, what about the core claim that he can’t send cops to watch the polls? Well, for starters, he can’t order any sheriffs into action because they’re local officers. He has no power over local officials. But the GOP could hire local cops who are off-duty to watch polling places on their behalf. It’s happened before, as I’ll explain below. As for federal LEO, various law profs pointed to 18 U.S.C. 592:

Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.

Okay, but one obvious way around that would be to make sure that any poll-watchers in federal law enforcement are unarmed on Election Day. Another would be to argue some constitutional exception or technicality. E.g., the statute violates separation of powers by presuming to tell the president how to command executive-branch officers. Or the statute doesn’t apply to the president because he’s not technically in the “civil service” of the United States.

My strong suspicion is that Trump has no idea what the plan is for poll watchers this November and just started riffing when Hannity put him on the spot about it. He mentioned police because that’s where his mind goes when he’s asked about authority figures thwarting possible wrongdoing. But it raises a question: What does he think a cop would do as a poll watcher that a civilian wouldn’t? What special task does he believe police alone might be capable of performing at the scene? No voter is going to pull a gun and demand to vote 100 times. Any chicanery that might attract the attention of law enforcement will also attract the attention of an average joe trained for Election Day. Who can, if need be, call the cops, of course.

The reason Democrats are freaked out about this is that there’s history here. Let me quote myself from a post written a year ago, after Stacey Abrams claimed that Trump and the GOP might, ah, send off-duty cops into polling places as poll watchers to intimidate minority voters. Abrams didn’t pluck that scenario out of thin air.

It sounds outlandish but that actually happened in New Jersey in 1981. Armed off-duty cops showed up at the polls in black neighborhoods wearing armbands identifying them as part of the “National Ballot Security Task Force,” which sounds like an official government agency but was actually just an outfit thrown together by the RNC. (There’s a Wikipedia page and everything.) It created enough of a stir that the RNC entered into a consent decree the following year in which it promised not to use such tactics for 35 years. The consent decree lapsed in 2017 and the DNC went to court to try to get it extended but lost. So, in theory, the RNC is free to try this again. Whether they’d dare do that in an age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media, when evidence of the “Ballot Security Task Force” staring down black voters in line to vote could and would be streamed in real-time on Election Day, is a separate question.

It’s unclear how many cops will be part of the GOP’s poll-watch operation this year but there *is* a poll-watch operation and it’s a big one. “[T]he Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are recruiting an estimated 50,000 volunteers to act as poll watchers – the GOP’s first national poll-patrol operation in nearly 40 years,” NBC reports. There should be no objection to an off-duty cop in civilian attire showing up to volunteer as a poll watcher for either party. The objection arises when the cops are in uniform, or in faux uniform a la the “National Ballot Security Task Force,” or if they’re armed. As we were reminded this past summer, not all Americans feel as safe and comfortable in an encounter with the police as white Americans do. If black voters have reason to believe there are cops at the polling place, some of them might not show.

Whether that’s what Trump intends by wanting police on the scene or if, as I suspect, he was just chattering off the cuff, who knows? Election law expert Rick Hasen thinks it might be deliberate, a scheme to deter turnout by threatening to have cops at the polls with no intention of actually following through:

Perhaps Trump is going to do nothing, and that the real end game is to deter people from voting out of fear the polling places are going to be a mess. This seems to be akin to Trump’s strategy of warning about mail in voting to deter turnout. After all, Trump (and Roger Stone via “Stop the Steal”) promised a bunch of “poll watchers” who never materialized. it’s not clear if they never materialized because this was just an effort to collect email addresses and fundraise or they couldn’t get their act together. But just talking about voter suppression can serve a political purpose for Trump.

Whether it’ll work is a separate question. After the activism of this summer, the extensive coverage of the legacy of John Lewis, and the urgent appeals by Barack and Michelle Obama (among others) at the convention to vote this fall, I don’t think anything’s going to intimidate black voters. That’s not to say there’ll be 2008-level turnout for Biden, but Trump’s heavy-handed attempts to discourage Democrats from voting are probably going to end up functioning more as a dare. Dare someone who doesn’t like you to do something and they’re apt to feel highly motivated to do it, just to prove that you underestimated them.

Such is the state of American politics in 2020 that we’re destined to have whichever party loses accusing the other of cheating its way to victory. Trump could have been a perfect civic choir boy this summer in his comments about election integrity and there’ll still be millions of Dems sniffing around for Russians if he beats Biden this fall. But for the record, his screeching about voting by mail has helped delegitimize his reelection even before the first ballots have been cast, per this Morning Consult data:

Independents take a dim view of Trump’s and DeJoy’s motives but in Trump’s case it’s a majority that believes his complaints about fraud are motivated by fear of people voting legitimately, not illegitimately. We’re either going to get a Biden win this fall with Republicans bleating that fake ballots were counted or a Trump win with Democrats bleating that authentic ballots weren’t. Day by day the country slides further towards a civic disaster. We can all see it coming from a mile away.