Trolls at the Polls

Will the GOP’s history of voter intimidation be repeated?

Here’s what happened in New Jersey in November 1981

On the day of the gubernatorial election, voters in several New Jersey cities showed up at their polling places to find posters printed in bright red: “WARNING: This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force.” Sure enough, roughly 200 BSTF patrols were deployed throughout the state. Many wore uniforms. Some carried guns.

One registered voter in Trenton, a Black woman, was asked by the patrollers to produce her registration card. When she couldn’t (because who even knows where their registration card is, let alone carries it around?), they turned her away. The same thing happened to Latino voters in Vineland, and to other voters in Camden and Atlantic City. In Newark, patrollers physically chased some voters away from the polls, and one issued an ominous warning to a poll worker not to stick around there after dark.

And guess what? It worked. The results were murky enough to trigger a recount. Weeks later, the Republican candidate Thomas Kean won by less than 1800 votes.

Conservatives have a long history of voter suppression, specifically aimed at voters of color, that stretches back to Reconstruction. But the antics of the BSTF in 1981 were blatant enough to prompt a federal lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee, resulting in a 1982 consent decree that barred the Republican National Committee from engaging in any similar conduct until 2017.

The RNC tried several times to get the consent decree lifted before it expired, but federal courts turned them down each time. As the New York Times reported on May 18,

The court ban on Republican Party voter-fraud operations was imposed in 1982, and then modified in 1986 and again in 1990, each time after courts found instances of Republicans intimidating or working to exclude minority voters in the name of preventing fraud. The party was found to have violated it yet again in 2004.

But then a shift in the political winds blew through federal benches

With the consent decree scheduled to expire in December 2017, the DNC sought an extension based on allegations of new proscribed conduct. The request was denied, clearing the way for Republicans to double down on making it uncomfortable, difficult, or impossible for people to vote — certain people, that is.

And the RNC and Donal Trump are all over it. As NBC News reported on June 8, the committee and the Trump campaign are ramping for up a poll-patrolling effort that hasn’t been seen for almost 40 years.

Poll watchers, or partisan election observers, are used by both parties in most states, under regulations set by each state that allows them. But with the RNC recruiting up to 50,000 poll monitors to focus on battleground states, and with the committee and the Trump campaign setting up a $20 million fund specifically for legal battles related to the election — and with the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision effectively blunting the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the signs are present that some of America’s darker history is primed to repeat itself.

It’s all happening behind the smokescreen of preventing voter fraud

Voter fraud is a non-problem, based on numerous studies that have found vanishingly little evidence for it. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his campaign from blowing it up into a bogeyman to manipulate the election and cast doubt on the legitimacy of its results, because of their well-founded terror of what those results are likely to be.

In the NBC News piece, Jane C. Trim says of the newly recharged Republican fervor for poll patrolling:

The Trump campaign says the aim is to prevent voter fraud before it happens, despite researchers, academics and the president’s own voter fraud commission all failing to find evidence that widespread fraud exists in years of searching.

In short, the RNC and Trump are spending $20 million and recruiting a small army for no other reason but to make it harder for people to vote. Hence the attacks on mail-in balloting, which have metastasized to a painfully obvious effort to kneecap the United States Postal Service.

The poll monitors don’t have to get rough to skew the vote

All they have to do is pull a few people out of line and question their eligibility or the status of their identification, or loom over the proceedings in such a way as to slow things down — especially during a time when people are loath to wait in lines and risk exposure to coronavirus, or who have enough trouble getting away from their essential jobs as it is, in order to get to the polls before they close (early, if the RNC can figure out a way to make that happen).

If they show up with armbands or are actually armed — which has happened before — the chilling effect on voters could be enough to skew the results in key districts and states.

They want to make it tough for you to vote. Be tougher

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick outlines the steps we can take to protect our right to vote — and to salvage a free and fair election no matter what forces stand in our way — in his excellent August 13 piece on Medium:

Mr. Patrick urges us to be prepared. If you’re not yet registered to vote, do it now. Then check to make sure your name appears on the voter rolls. Decide ahead of time if you’ll vote in person or by mail. If you vote by mail, request your ballot as early as possible (if you live in a state that requires you to request a mail ballot), and mail it in as early as possible. If you’re voting in person, find out if your state requires I.D. and what kind, and make sure you have that with you. And be prepared to wait in line.

Yes, it could be a real hassle. But there has never been a more critical election than this one, and your vote has never been more important.

As Mr. Deval writes,

This time the character of the country is on the ballot. And every American citizen has a stake in that.