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Citizen Poll Watchers and the Mail-In Ballot Ruling: Jim Pfaff on Conservative Commandos Radio Show | Sep 16, 2026

Published: September 16, 2026
Network: AUN TV
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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Sharron Angle asked the question from Nevada. Her state is one of 23 that has stonewalled any audit and any attempt at securing mail-in ballots, and she wanted to know whether something was coming or whether the hinterland would simply hope for a fair and honest election again. On the September 16, 2026 edition of the Conservative Commandos Radio Show, Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff gave her an answer with no comfort in it and no despair in it either: the Supreme Court took away the one remedy that was moving, the Justice Department and the FBI can only be a backstop, and what is left is poll watchers — citizens working precincts, which is where Pfaff says the authority sat all along. Over 41 minutes with Rick Trader and Sharron Angle he also ran through the RNC midterm convention and argued that the real danger in artificial intelligence is not China but your own government.

Topics Covered

• The Midterm Convention: RFK Jr. and One Objection
• The Iran Rift and the Massie Impeachment Push
• Elections Are Ours to Run: The Case for Citizen Poll Watchers
• ICE at Polling Places and the Deterrent Effect
• Data Centers, Open Source, and Who Controls AI
• Key Takeaways

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The Midterm Convention: RFK Jr. and One Objection

Trader asked whether the convention moved the needle. Pfaff said it did two things. The first was the speeches: Trump had some great ones, JD Vance had a great speech, they addressed the issues people care about, and Pfaff believes it got out to the troops. The establishment media, he said, was incapable of saying much negative. The speech he singled out was not from a movement conservative at all.

“RFK Jr., by the way, gave one of the best political speeches I’ve ever heard in my life. And this is a guy who’s not necessarily a thoroughgoing conservative like we are, but he does understand the American dream. He understands the Constitution and he totally understands what’s at stake.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Scott Bessent also drew a mention among the fantastic other speeches. But Pfaff refused to claim the convention settled anything: he will not yet say the independent voter has tipped the balance. He put the calendar at 49 or 48 days out and said there is still a whole lot of work to do. His one negative was about money.

“My only negative on Donald Trump in that convention is offering $5,000 to every American.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The only way to fund that through Congress is through more debt. Pfaff allowed that Trump is kind of jerking the chain of Democrats, who are always giving away much more than he is even thinking about — the reason the country carries a nearly $2 trillion deficit and a $40 trillion debt, with Republicans playing a role too. Where he wants the message pointed is at the 60 open seats that will seat a brand new member of Congress. Every Republican running in one should take Trump’s convention message and add a line: and I am going to go help him fulfill that. If all 60 did it, that would change the dynamic in Washington. If 30 did, it would radically change it.

The Iran Rift and the Massie Impeachment Push

Angle opened by asking whether there is still a rift inside the Republican Party. Pfaff said there is, and located it on the Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens wing — with Megyn Kelly going back and forth — that is very upset with Trump about the Iran war. He put Thomas Massie’s attempted impeachment of Pete Hegseth in the same category and said he came out most decidedly against it. It obviously was not going to go anywhere; Massie is making a statement.

Pfaff was careful about what he was objecting to. He counts himself a libertarian in his political approach, and said it is important to rigorously do a critical analysis of what we are doing and whether we are meeting the goals we set out to achieve. Debate what you want; his complaint is the lack of focus, and his judgment is that on the Iran war the critical wing is getting it entirely wrong. He kept his own reservations on the record — he had concerns and maintains them, and it is certainly not politically useful in and of itself. What he rejects is the charge that Trump is committed to forever wars. Trump has been persistently trying for a negotiated settlement Pfaff called far more generous than the Iranians deserve, from a regime that has killed thousands of Americans and which he said there is reason to think was connected at least in a tangential fashion to 9/11. The other faction he named is the John Thune wing, the RINOs, who in his words are not interested at all in doing what we want.

Elections Are Ours to Run: The Case for Citizen Poll Watchers

Angle’s question was about remedies, and the one Pfaff arrived at was citizen poll watchers. He began, though, with the remedy that died. The last key thing was just shut down when the Supreme Court acted — and the Court, he stressed, did not rule on the merits of whether the Post Office could stop fraudulent ballots from going in the mail. It said the government would likely lose its case down in the appellate court. Pfaff’s own read is that the Post Office is not merely permitted but required to stop fraudulent ballots, and that this was never Trump inventing a methodology for them: the postal leadership, not necessarily filled with Trumpsters, understood the wire fraud laws too. He called the standing analysis a farce — Trump could not get standing on any of his 2020 challenges, and now no one who has yet been harmed by an election has standing either.

“We needed a good pitcher and a good pitch, and the Supreme Court took that away.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

What remains is enforcement after the fact and poll watchers at the precinct. Pfaff said the Justice Department needs to be a backstop, and it sounds like Todd Blanche is setting that up. Kash Patel testified that week that the FBI is going to be at election facilities, absolutely, because it is their job. Pfaff called that good — then named it for what it is: the catcher, not the pitch.

He refused to let the ruling work as a reason to quit. The same circumstance existed going into 2024 — no mitigations against breaking the law or violating the rules of elections — and Trump won. That history is why TCC has pressed the mail-ballot fight as a turnout question as much as a legal one, the argument in our analysis of GOP turnout and mail-in ballots. The ground is the same ground, which puts the onus back on citizens: work hard, tell your neighbors to vote, and if you are still able, be a poll watcher and work an election precinct so these things are handled properly.

“And I think everyone needs to understand elections are ours to run.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That is a claim about where authority sits, and he addressed it to Angle as someone who knows the laws and the tradition of the American election system. Elections were never run by secretaries of state or county clerks, he said, and he described what those offices are for.

“The purpose and role of a secretary of state and a county clerk is to receive the audited information that citizens have put together at the polling place and then to validate that those numbers represented are accurate.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That is the only role they play, in his account, and they have no constitutional authority to say how elections should be run. It follows that poll watchers are not spectators observing someone else’s process — they are the people performing the audit the clerk later validates. Pfaff acknowledged only a handful of people by percentage are in a position to serve, and made the ask anyway: everyone listening who loves their country and feels capable should get on it. With the courts having removed the pitch, the number of citizens willing to become poll watchers is the variable Republicans still control.

ICE at Polling Places and the Deterrent Effect

Trader picked up on the call for poll watchers and raised the next front: Markwayne Mullin has said ICE agents will be out at the polls, and Democrats are already running to the courts to stop it. What Trader said he is advocating is publicizing the fact that the likelihood of ICE agents being at polling places is real — that the threat alone can reduce the number of illegal voters who attempt to vote.

Pfaff agreed, with a condition attached at the front: it has to be conducted properly, and when the inevitable retort comes from liberals who will also try to cause problems at the polls, that has to be handled well politically. With that said, all of ICE is duty-bound to be where you may have concentrations of illegal aliens, and it is the job of ICE to find people here illegally and use the administrative processes Congress put in place — not the court system — to deport them. He then answered the objection before it was made.

“They’ll be intimidating potentially illegal voters, and they ought to intimidate them.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Polling places are sacrosanct and you are not supposed to intimidate voters, Pfaff said, restating the rule he expects quoted back at him — and his answer is that this is not the intimidation of voters, and in this case it is not inappropriate. Trader supplied a counterexample from the other direction: he went to vote wearing a placard around his neck and was not let into the polling place until he took it off, so by the prevailing standard he was intimidated as a voter. Pfaff’s broader complaint was that there has not been enough enforcement to begin with — Markwayne Mullin, and Kristi Noem before him, have not done nearly enough to go to places of employment.

Data Centers, Open Source, and Who Controls AI

Trader set up the last segment as a believer: AI is the way of the future, the two players are the United States and China, and he wants the United States to win. The people he cannot understand are the anti-data-center activists, now joined by Barack Obama, telling Americans they will all be dead in 10 years.

Pfaff’s first move was to follow the money. A lot of dark money is being deployed, including some Chinese money, to bring up the AI doomsday scenario everyone is talking about — a pattern TCC has documented in our reporting on Chinese money and the data center fight. He added a second source: Megan Basham, who wrote Shepherds for Sale, recently exposed money flowing to the Gospel Coalition and other online sites pushing AI doomerism. His instruction to Christians was blunt — if your pastor starts talking apocalyptically about AI, he is a false teacher in that area.

On regulation he borrowed Jensen Huang’s framing and JD Vance’s: if you have a product that is unsafe, do not release it; if you are building Frankenstein, do not release Frankenstein, and if you did, give companies the tools to oppose it. What Dario Amodei and the other doomsters want instead is an internationalist organization to run all of it. Then he named the threat he considers larger.

“Listen, China’s a real threat if they win the AI race, but I’m gonna tell you, there’s an even bigger threat. It’s your government.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

His reasoning is a sequence. If government takes over the AI industry through regulation in any fashion, the next Democrat president inherits it — and Biden-era censorship, bad as it was, never had the surveillance network AI can feed into. There are Democrats, he said, who want a social scoring system so they can track everything you are doing. Google holding your information may be icky, but that is light compared to a federal government that wants to shut you out of public debate, shut down your business the way hundreds of thousands were shut during COVID, and use a social credit score to close your bank accounts, as the Biden administration did to conservative organizations.

On the apocalypse itself he was dismissive. AI has no substantive ability to destroy the world; that is a false claim. There are potential dangers, maybe, but not of the sort being described. This is not a Terminator movie, he said, and the doomers telling people that Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to show up and kill them are selling a fantasy. The proportionate risk, in his analogy, is knowing that when the Model T came out, walking on the road might be more dangerous than it had been with horses and buggies.

“If you’re a conservative and complain about data centers, you’re using a data center right now.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Key Takeaways

1. The Supreme Court never reached the merits – It did not rule on whether the Post Office could stop fraudulent ballots; it said the government would likely lose in the appellate court, on standing reasoning Pfaff called a farce.
2. Enforcement is the backstop, not the pitch – Todd Blanche appears to be setting up a Justice Department backstop and Kash Patel testified the FBI will be at election facilities, but both act only after the ball is thrown.
3. Poll watchers are the remedy citizens still hold – With the ground the same as 2024, Pfaff asked listeners to work precincts as poll watchers, arguing elections are ours to run and that clerks exist only to validate the audit citizens perform at the polling place.
4. ICE at the polls is a deterrent, properly conducted – Asked about it right after his call for poll watchers, Pfaff said ICE will be intimidating potentially illegal voters and ought to, and faulted Markwayne Mullin and Kristi Noem before him for not doing nearly enough at places of employment.
5. The convention’s one flaw was the $5,000 offer – Pfaff praised RFK Jr.’s speech as one of the best he has ever heard, but said $5,000 to every American can only be funded through more debt on a nearly $2 trillion deficit and $40 trillion debt.
6. Government, not China, is the bigger AI threat – Regulation hands a future Democrat president a surveillance network the Biden era never had, and Pfaff says the frontier labs push it because open-source local compute is about to take their business.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Sep 16, 2026 on the Conservative Commandos Radio Show with Rick Trader and Sharron Angle, AUN TV.