People who follow Trump’s advice and hang around watching polling places will be prosecuted, Nevada’s attorney general says

• Nevada’s attorney general said he will prosecute people who do what President Donald Trump suggested: going to polling places to monitor votes being counted.
• Aaron Ford said the president was encouraging voter intimidation, and said “voter intimidation is illegal in Nevada. Believe me when I say it: You do it, and you will be prosecuted.”
• Trump made the suggestion in his debate against Joe Biden on Tuesday, where he refused to commit to accepting the election result and baselessly claimed mail-in voting is open to fraud.
• Experts say voting by mail is safe, but Trump has been groundlessly casting doubt on it for months. Experts say the president may dispute the results if Biden wins with mail-in ballots.
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Nevada’s attorney general said he will prosecute people who follow President Donald Trump’s advice to go to polling places and monitor votes being counted, claiming the president was encouraging voter intimidation.

During his first debate against Democratic rival Joe Biden on Tuesday, Trump refused to commit to accepting the results of the November election, repeating his unsubstantiated claims that mail-in voting is open to widespread fraud instead.

The president added: “I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that’s what has to happen.”

Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford later tweeted: “Trump also told ‘his supporters’ to ‘go into the polls and watch very carefully.’

“But he wasn’t talking about poll watching. He was talking about voter intimidation.”

"FYI — voter intimidation is illegal in Nevada. Believe me when I say it: You do it, and you will be prosecuted."

—Aaron D. Ford (@AaronDFordNV) September 30, 2020

Trump has been groundlessly casting doubt on the integrity of the election outcome for months. Experts believe he may use this narrative to dispute the election results if he is shown to lose after mail-in ballots are counted.

Postal voting is expected to be more widely used than usual due to the coronavirus pandemic, and experts say fraud in the process is extremely rare and highly likely to be detected if it occurs.

Voting this way has been possible for decades, and some states already use it as their primary voting method with no issues.

At Tuesday's debate, Trump said that people should go and watch being counted because people had apparently been prevented from doing so in Philadelphia.

"I am urging them to do it. As you know today, there was a big problem: In Philadelphia, they went in to watch, they're called poll watchers — it's a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out, they weren't allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, that's why."

But as Business Insider's Grace Panetta previously reported, legitimate poll officers in Philadelphia have not been prevented from doing their jobs as people do "in-person absentee" voting, which is the only type of in-person voting that has started in the state so far.

Trump on Tuesday also repeated a claim that ballots in the 2020 election could be manipulated: "I hope it's going to be a fair election. If it's a fair election, I'm 100% on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that."

There is no evidence that any ballots will be manipulated.

The Trump administration has filed lawsuits in several states, including Nevada, to stop their plans to make it easier for people to vote by mail.

Trump has also appeared to encourage people to vote twice in North Carolina, saying they should vote first by mail-in vote and they should then go to their polling station and vote again if the mail-in vote has not yet been counted. Voting twice is illegal.