National and state Republican Party officials are slowly revving up recruitment and plans for what they say will be an “unprecedented” Election Day army of 100,000 poll workers, monitors and lawyers.

A Republican National Committee official told NBC News that the organization has already recruited “tens of thousands” of people to serve in these roles and has hired paid election integrity directors in 13 states, including in key battlegrounds, to oversee volunteers. Weekly trainings are underway, the official said, as the party doubles down on one of former President Donald Trump’s pet issues, election integrity, five months out from the 2024 vote.

But the party has otherwise provided scant details on its plans, as critics argue that a 100,000-person force to fight the fictional foe of widespread voter fraud is overly aspirational. In interviews, state and national Republican officials declined repeatedly to offer specifics on recruitment, training activities and deployment plans.

The officials said the 100,000 figure is a goal for their national force, and that they’re recruiting volunteers through local parties and the RNC-run website Protectthevote.com. An RNC official said the party will focus heavily on beefing up the ranks of volunteers in seven battleground states in particular: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. Supporters interested in working the polls are being referred to local election officials, too, as the RNC seeks to ensure that more Republicans are working the polls and counting ballots.

A handful of states — including Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Virginia — have poll worker parity requirements, which seek to force officials to hire equal members of both parties. In materials shared with donors, the RNC boasted of filing complaints and lawsuits in Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada to try and get more Republicans working the polls.

“Our unprecedented effort is in full swing for the primaries and continues to ramp up for November 5th. Every American deserves a system where it is easy to vote and hard to cheat, and our team will ensure every vote is counted legally and fairly,” said Gineen Bresso, the election integrity director for the RNC and the Trump campaign.

But Democrats with experience working closely with voter protection efforts argued that the RNC is exaggerating their work and said they were skeptical that Republicans could really recruit that many people to monitor the polls for fraud. 

“Every two years, we see a different fictional number, and every two years, the actual number of people that show up is nowhere close,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor and former democracy adviser for President Joe Biden’s White House. “They’ve never been able to get even a fraction of that number.”

Levitt, who ran the voter protection campaign for Barack Obama’s 2008 bid, said that campaign “did really well and got multiple tens of thousands” of volunteers and attorneys to answer questions and troubleshoot problems that arose. It’ll be harder, he argued, to recruit people to look for voter fraud, because it is exceedingly rare.

After Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination in March, the RNC’s election integrity work escalated. The party rolled out a series of lawsuits arguing the voter rolls in certain swing states were bloated and staffed up election lawyers. In April, the RNC promised to deploy an army of supporters on Election Day to “protect the vote and ensure a big win” in November.

In early May, the RNC told donors they were implementing a full-time, permanent Election Integrity Department, boasting of going to court to defend election restrictions, like voter ID, that had been implemented by Republican legislatures around the country in recent years.

As for its army of volunteers, Republican officials in many of the seven states the RNC is targeting remained mostly vague on recruiting progress for volunteers and on what specific duties they would be dispatched to do.

In Wisconsin, state GOP Chairman Brian Schimming said volunteers will likely be dispatched not only as poll workers and poll monitors, but also to monitor drop boxes if the state Supreme Court rules, as many expect it will, to expand their use in the state ahead of the November election.

Schimming predicted that there will be “thousands” of poll workers and poll watchers, as well as “hundreds” of attorneys in place in Wisconsin by the start of early voting in the state. He said that the “foundation” was put in place during the state GOP’s recruitment program last fall, when officials enlisted 5,500 volunteers they could utilize. 

Victoria LaCivita, a spokesperson for the coordinated Trump campaign in Michigan, said GOP officials in the state were “recruiting nationwide” for the volunteer roles and that “our election integrity teams are working every day to recruit and train folks.”

But she declined to provide specific recruitment numbers, she wrote in an email, “because it would be like asking the University of Michigan to share their playbook with Ohio State before the big game.”

North Carolina GOP spokesperson Matt Mercer said that the state party was “committed to building on election integrity efforts in 2020 and 2022 to ensure elections in our state are safe, secure, fair, and transparent” and that the state party was “actively involved and engaged at every level of the elections process.” But when pressed for details regarding recruiting and other forward-looking logistics regarding election integrity, a North Carolina GOP official declined to offer details, saying that the “methods and metrics we are using are proprietary information.”

Spokespersons for the state Republican parties in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada declined to answer questions about their recruitment efforts and election integrity programs, while a spokesperson for the Georgia Republican Party didn’t respond to questions.

Republican officials in many of those battleground states also pointed to a growing mountain of election litigation the party was spearheading as a part of the broader effort. 

In March, the Nevada Republican Party and the RNC jointly filed a suit alleging that the state’s voter rolls were “inflated” and that Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, was not “properly maintaining” the state’s voter registration lists.” They filed another suit last month challenging a state rule allowing mail ballots to be accepted up to four days after Election Day, alleging the deadline violates federal law, and yet another suit on Monday challenging Nevada’s counting of mail ballots received after Election Day that lack a postmark.

The RNC and Michigan Republican Party filed similar suits in March and May, alleging “inflated” and “inaccurate” voter rolls as well as “unlawful” guidance regarding signature verification practices for voters casting absentee ballots.

And in North Carolina, the state GOP, together with the RNC, sued last month to require stricter rules on accepting mail ballots, as well as what forms of identification are required to show, according to the state’s voter ID laws.