The Republican Party is building a program to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers in over a dozen states to conduct anti-”voter fraud” efforts, which means monitoring polls and challenging votes and voter registrations, according to the New York Times.

The party, backed by President Donald Trump, is spending $20 million on its efforts, which intends to recruit up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 states to “monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious,” the Times reports. The money is also intended to fight Democratic-backed lawsuits against alleged voter suppression efforts on the part of Republicans.

The GOP appears to be capitalizing on a 2018 federal court decision allowing a decades-long consent decree to expire, which had barred the Republican National Committee from pursuing certain “ballot security” measures. In that effort in New Jersey in 1981, the RNC started a “ballot security task force” of armed, off-duty police officers to patrol minority-majority precincts in Newark and Trenton.

The court decree had been violated by the GOP […]