This post originally appeared on Vogue.
Much of our country’s voting population is already on edge as we approach Election Day on Tuesday: Are the polls to be believed? Are the lines—already stretching on for hours across the country during early voting—showing any signs of abating? (And is that a good thing or a bad thing?) And, yes: Will our votes—all of them, whether in-person or mail-in—be counted?
What seems to be a record turnout, so far, is heartening. Early signs that voter intimidation attempts at or near polling places might also be in the rise, though, are troubling. Why the increase? One reason is that the president—who, during earlier rallies, encouraged his fans to rough up any protesters they saw—openly stated during a nationally televised debate: “I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that’s what has to happen.” Trump also claimed (falsely) that somewhere between three and five million people voted illegally in the last election, and that his campaign has been collecting signatures for months from supporters who are willing to “watch” the voting this time—just to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up.
The increasing visibility of far-right extremist groups, many of them armed, would seem to add fuel to the fire. So, too, does the expiration of a 1981 decree that bars the Republican National Committee from pursuing “ballot security” measures. The decree was enacted after the Democratic National Committee sued the RNC to stop them from purging Black citizens from voter rolls by nefarious means, including hiring off-duty cops with “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands to patrol predominantly Black precincts. Seven years later, after an RNC official was caught saying that the voter-challenge list they were maintaining could “keep the Black vote down considerably,” the decree was updated.
In 1990, after the RNC was found to be intimidating voters with postcard mailings listing voting regulations, the decree was updated again, and in 2004, after another RNC voter-challenge list targeting Black voters was discovered, it was updated yet again. Yet in 2017, a federal judge let this decree expire. Was voter intimidation dying out? No—it was simply being outsourced away from the RNC.
Just why are Democrats trying to make it easier for everyone to vote while Republicans—both currently and historically—are seemingly doing everything within their ability to make voting more difficult? That one’s easy: Simple demographics show a kind of death-spiral for their entire party as the electorate gets younger, more diverse, and more liberal. Without limiting voting—and without an almost ridiculous kind of gerrymandering to conjure Republican-friendly districts out of Democratic-trending areas—they would have already ceased to be a viable party.
All that being said, are there indications of widespread and organized attempts at voter intimidation? Not so far—but the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is working with the Institute of Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University to provide legal response to any voters reporting intimidation at the polls, has noted that they’ve seen a rise in complaints already, including reports of militia activity.
But … isn’t this … illegal? Well, yeah: Federal law says that “no person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote.” One would think that doing something like, say, brandishing a weapon at a polling place would be covered under this—but one would be wrong: Only about a dozen states explicitly ban either concealed or open-carry weapons at the polls. (Michigan’s Secretary of State, who recently banned such weapons, had that order overturned by the state’s Republican-dominated Supreme Court this week.)
