WHAT’S HAPPENING
Left-wing activist groups that spent the past two years harassing federal immigration agents are now pivoting to a new target: your local polling place. A donor network operating through the left-wing Tides Foundation has announced plans to convert "ICE watch" volunteers into election monitors for the 2026 midterms.
The initiative seeks to place activists trained in "nonviolent resistance" and "economic noncooperation" at precincts across battleground states.
THE FACTS
The activist group Movement Voter Fund's May pitch explicitly calls for "training ICE watch volunteers to be election monitors."
Previous ICE watch groups have been extremely radical, disrupting operations and seeking to resist “colonial militarized regimes.”
The $450,000 budget flows through Soros-funded Tides Foundation to Freedom Trainers, Horizons Project, and States at the Core.
Freedom Trainers promotes tactics including boycotts, strikes, "blocking raids," and "insiders leaking and slowing harmful policies."
Their "People's Election Playbook" culminates in "economic noncooperation" if activists reject the election results.
Democrats plan to train volunteers for 25 percent of the nation's 95,000 polling places through the "New Battlefield Project."
Volunteers will wear blue vests at polling locations to provide "visible presence" against federal agents.
Organizers are targeting precincts with large black, Latino, and Asian populations they call "electoral power centers."
Training materials draw lessons from resistance movements that challenged governments in Serbia, Chile, Poland, and the Philippines.
OUR TAKE
Jurisdictions typically allow partisan poll watchers on the assumption that having people from both sides of the aisle keeps everyone honest. But this idea doesn’t work if people doing the "watching" have been trained as radical activists to intimidate and disrupt.
These “observers” have been trained in protest tactics and resistance, so there’s a real risk they could intimidate voters and interfere with election workers or voters, possibly compromising ballot secrecy and the election's overall security. Observers are supposed to respect voter privacy and stay out of the way, but leftist activists steeped in anti-ICE protest tactics are trained to disrupt by any means necessary.
