Donald Trump supporters
who plan to stake out polling sites on Election Day may find their own
activities tracked closely by thousands of civil-rights activists who are
mounting a nationwide effort to prevent problems at the polls.

The Republican presidential
candidate, who has repeatedly said that the election is rigged, has urged his
backers to monitor voting sites for evidence of fraud, raising concerns that
overzealous supporters could intimidate voters in the Nov. 8 election.

They will not be the only
ones out in force on Election Day. Civil rights groups say they plan to deploy
thousands of volunteers on the ground in 27 states to ensure that voters will
not be turned away by harassment, long lines or confusing rules. Teams of
lawyers will file legal challenges if necessary.

While previous elections
have been marred by irregularities, Trump’s rhetoric might lead to greater
problems at the polls this year, activists say.

“When Trump says,
‘Go and watch certain areas of Philadelphia,’ that’s either intentionally
reckless or it’s a thinly veiled call to engage in racial profiling,” said
Dale Ho, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights
project. “Whether people will heed it, I don’t know.”

Non-partisan groups have
mounted “election protection” programs since the disputed Bush-Gore
presidential election of 2000, but they faced a more daunting landscape this
year even before Trump began warning of a “rigged election.”

The Supreme Court in 2013
weakened the U.S. government’s ability to monitor voting activity in states
with a history of racial discrimination, and dozens of Republican-led states
have also passed laws that require voters to present photo identification or
that restrict voting in other ways.

As early voting gets
underway in many states, voting-rights groups are publicizing a national
hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, and establishing lines of communication with the
election officials who are tasked with resolving problems.

“We haven’t
encountered a situation yet where we feel there’s a need to call the
police,” said Marcia Johnson-Blanco, a co-director of the voting rights
project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

This year, civil-rights
groups are broadening their efforts beyond perpetual battlegrounds like Ohio
and Florida to conservative states like Texas, where they plan to field 200
volunteers to monitor polling sites in Houston’s Harris County.

“We’ve seen an
uptick of folks saying they’re going to be out patrolling in a way that we
think is trying to be intimidating,” said Zenen Jaimes Perez,
communications director for the Texas Civil Rights Project.

In New York, volunteers
with Common Cause are expanding their monitoring programs to Muslim
neighborhoods in New York City and some areas of the rural Hudson Valley.

“What Trump’s
efforts have caused us here in New York to think about are places where there
are concentrations of voters who, I hate to say, are easy targets – a magnet
for people who are extreme,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of
Common Cause New York.

Democratic officials have
stepped up their efforts as well. In Arizona, a traditionally Republican state
that is competitive this year, Democrats plans to deploy a record 200 lawyers
to make sure that everybody who is in line when polls close at 7 p.m. will get
a chance to cast a ballot, said Spencer Scharff, the state party’s voter
protection director.

But at the end of the
day, poll monitors do not have the power to fix problems – they can only point
them out to election officials.

“States have the most
important role. They’re the ones who write these laws and they have to enforce
these laws,” said Danielle Davis, a staff attorney at the Advancement
Project, a national civil-rights group.