Some local Electoral Board members pushed officers of election and authorized representatives, also commonly referred to as “pollwatchers,” to attend trainings with inaccurate information, independent of official trainings provided by the Commonwealth. In those trainings, organizers stated their goal was to recruit 15,000 people to serve as the main “line of defense against election fraud.”

A central figure in these controversies is Albemarle County Electoral Board member Clara Belle Wheeler. She provided trainings across the state in conjunction with the Virginia Fair Elections Coalition.

In Prince William County, a former member of the Electoral Board accused a current member of pressuring the General Registrar to arrange a partisan training session for election officers, which was described as “possibly illegal.” In Fairfax County, Electoral Board member Chris Henzel supported some elements of Wheeler’s training, saying he was disappointed ELECT “has given some guidance that Fairfax County should not do this.” Lynchburg’s Electoral Board relied on Wheeler’s input to craft new end-of-term procedures for the Registrar and Deputy Registrar. In Nottoway County, a Republican-appointed member of the Electoral Board was censured in 2022 following an altercation at an election worker training event when the member tried to let a local Republican audit the training.

Pollworkers and “poll watchers” trained with the wrong information have real, negative impacts on the election process. In Lynchburg, official GOP pollwatchers “consistently followed election officers uncomfortably closely” and tried to get officials to sign a form “on which they had written total votes-cast number by candidate from the voting tabulating machines.” When officials declined to sign the forms, “authorized representatives became belligerent.” Across the city, Republican representatives asked to “see the tapes” and “insisted on being given the tapes in their hands” though standard procedure was to lay the tape on the table. At Lynchburg’s largest polling station, three pollworkers resigned from their positions due to harassment and the location “declined to serve as a polling station” in the future “for the same reason.”