A coalition of military veterans and families announced a new effort Tuesday to bolster the ranks of election workers by recruiting within the military community
Vet the Vote, a project of We the Veterans, aims to enlist 100,000 veterans and military family members to be poll workers during the 2022 election, and to help sustain future elections as well.
“We see this as a new norm for veterans and military families members,” said Ellen Gustafson, co-executive director of Vet the Vote. “We don't envision that 2022 is going to be the one time that we call 100,000 military veterans and military film members to do this job.”
Veterans are “deeply committed to democracy,” said Anil Nathan, a second co-executive director. “The challenges are solvable. … Military families can lead.”
According to data collected by Vet the Votes, about 130,000 election workers have quit during the past three midterm cycles and two-thirds of election officials have said they struggle to recruit enough people to staff voting locations.
“Our intention as an organization, We the Veterans, was to find an opportunity for veterans and military family members to volunteer for democracy,” said another of the co-executive directors, Ellen Gustafson, who referenced the seemingly small but important tasks that come with working a polling location.
“All of those incredibly important jobs need to be done by citizens and what better group of citizens than veterans and military family members who've already proven their commitment to stand up and protect our democracy,” she said.
While Vet the Votes wants to support elections nationwide through its nearly two dozen coalition partners, the organization recognizes that some states are more in need than others. The campaign is particularly focused on recruiting poll workers in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin.
“What we are hoping is that by partly doing a national push we can engage as many veterans as possible, but that, if we do need to get more local .. in areas where really the need is exceptionally great we hope that, through these incredible partner organizations, we can target some of those communities,” Gustafson said.
Retired Gen. George Casey, who in addition to serving as Army chief of staff also supported elections in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, is helping launch the effort.
Casey said he got involved in Vet the Vote after he had already signed up to be a poll worker in Arlington, Va.
“Even though that might seem like it's a small thing, confidence in our election process is fundamental to sustaining any democracy,” he said. “And it struck me that, by getting involved, I might just be able to do something to help restore a level of confidence to our electoral system.”
One of the factors driving experienced poll workers away has been a rise in threats made against them since the 2020 election, when Donald Trump and many of his backers claimed, without evidence, that the election had been stolen from him. Many still do not feel safe.
The organizers of Vet the Vote believe they can help alleviate this problem.
“What a perfect call to action for our veteran community, people who are trained at remaining calm under pressure, are trained at actually diffusing complex situations, are trained because of what they do as military members to put country over party and make sure that everyone is mission focused and not getting distracted by by any kind specific small sets,” Gustafson said. “I think that's that really is part of why we think this is a perfect community to step into this opportunity and and again to do this going forward, not just for these 2022 midterms but really going forward.”
Organizers stressed that this is a nonpartisan campaign, regardless of the political beliefs of members of the military community.
For us this is 100 percent purely a pro-democracy effort that has zero connection or affiliation to any level of partisanship,” said Nathan.
Coalition partners include Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the NFL, Civic Alliance, the National Military Family Association and the Military Officers Association of America.
“We believe that the threat to democracy is real and we're proud to be a part of this initiative in order to strengthen the legitimacy of our elections and ensure that Americans get involved in the electoral process,” said Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of coalition partner VetVoice Foundation.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.