Republican voter intimidation tactics: A serious attack on democracy or not?

Old-fashioned voter intimidation

A few weeks ago, several sources reported that at least one red state was planning to use voter police to investigate election fraud. That didn’t seem like a problem. No one condones voter fraud, so investigating it seemed innocent. And since there is very little voter fraud to investigate not much would happen, maybe other than some featherbedding and power napping on the job. 

Then, a long time interlocutor strenuously argued that this was much worse. I was given a link and ordered to read an article written by Thom Hartmann for Salon. There is an interesting snippet of history about William Rehnquist, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Here it is:

Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about "voter fraud."

Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the ’60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: They’re part of a larger election fraud program the GOP has used to suppress the vote for 60 years now.

This election year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is raising the stakes: He’s planning to put together a force of "election police" under his personal command to travel the state intimidating voters while pretending to look for "voter fraud."

DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to 'build an army' of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who 'will have the confidence and courage' to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

These efforts to intimidate voters are part of a much larger Republican campaign of widespread and systemic election fraud that the party has been running since the days of Barry Goldwater. Democrats need to start calling it that.

Voter fraud, in other words, isn’t real. But election fraud is very much real and alive, and that’s exactly what DeSantis and the Texas GOP are proposing, right out in the open.

This has a long history, stretching back to the era when the Republican Party first began trying to cater to the white racist vote.

In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater — who was running for president on the Republican ticket — openly opposed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts that President Lyndon Johnson was then pushing through Congress.

These elections where only white people were allowed to vote in large numbers were fraudulent elections.

After all, isn't it a fraud to say that a “free and fair” election was held when, in fact, large numbers of people who were legally qualified and wanted to vote weren’t allowed their voice?

How can that not be a fraudulent election?

And back in 1964, Goldwater and the Republicans wanted to keep it that way.

But as the issue of voting rights was showing up on the nightly news and people were marching across the country for their right to vote, Republicans on Goldwater’s team realized they needed a justification for the status quo. 

So they came up with a story that they started selling in the 1964 election through op-eds, in speeches and on the news. This story was simple:

There was massive “voter fraud” going on, where mostly Black people are voting more than once in different polling places and doing so under different names, often, as Donald Trump recently said, “by the busload” after Sunday church services. In addition, the Republican story went, “illegal aliens” living in the United States were voting in the millions.

None of it was true, but it became the foundation of a nationwide voter suppression campaign that the GOP continues to promote to this day.

A campaign of actual “election fraud” based on the lie of “voter fraud.”

William Rehnquist, for example, was a 40-year-old Arizona lawyer and Republican activist in 1964, when his idol, Goldwater, ran against Johnson for president.

Rehnquist helped organize a program called Operation Eagle Eye in his state to challenge the vote of every Hispanic and Black voter and to dramatically slow down the voting lines in communities of color to discourage people who had to get back to work from waiting hours in line to vote.

As Democratic poll watcher Lito Pena observed at the time, Rehnquist showed up at a southern Phoenix polling place to do his part in Operation Eagle Eye:

“He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman,” Pena told a reporter. “He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there — every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people … were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.”

Rehnquist was richly rewarded for his activism; he quickly rose through the GOP ranks to being appointed by President Nixon, in 1972, to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was elevated in 1986 by President Reagan to chief justice, a position he used to stop the Florida State Supreme Court-mandated vote recount in 2000, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

(Interestingly, two then-little-known lawyers who worked with the Bush legal team to argue before Rehnquist that the Florida recount should be stopped were John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Bush rewarded Roberts by putting him on the court as chief justice when Rehnquist died. Roberts was also the tie-breaking vote to allow Ohio to continue its voter purges in 2017, and wrote the 5–4 decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.)

Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of hundreds of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As The New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:

Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent vote fraud in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry “fraud.”

The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from “stealing” the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.

The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as “a program of voter intimidation.” He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.

"There is no doubt in my mind," Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, "that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd."

Republican positions both then and now are not generally popular. Who’d vote, after all, for more tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, banking deregulation, gutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security, shipping jobs overseas, keeping drug prices high and preventing workers from forming unions?

The GOP’s sweet spot, however, is scaring white people about “crime” by minorities, particularly African Americans and Hispanics. Which is why Donald Trump told Congress that “3 to 5 million fraudulent” votes were cast in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton. 

And when they can’t clamp down enough on ID laws or close enough polling places in Black neighborhoods, they fall back on “election police,” the 2022 version of Operation Eagle Eye.

As the conservative Town Hall site notes about the election just held in Virginia that saw that state’s governor’s office flip to a Republican:

Not only did the RNC indeed have “a robust poll watching operation,” involving 50 election integrity trainings with over 3,200 attendees, but such an operation produced results. In the 37 [many minority] target Virginia counties, poll watchers covered 100 percent of polling locations, the November memo confirmed.

This is one dimension of a much larger nationwide campaign of Republican voter suppression election fraud, using the phony excuse of trying to stop “voter fraud.”

They’ve already started, in numerous states, seizing control of election systems in minority neighborhoods, aggressively purging voter lists, outlawing mail-in voting or making it far more difficult, and closing polling places by the hundreds.

This year, and particularly in 2024, they’re reviving Operation Eagle Eye to have armed militia volunteers and "election police" confront people in their own neighborhoods on Election Day, all in a craven attempt to discourage minority voting.

Now that neither the Supreme Court nor Congress is willing to stop them, we must, like Paul Revere, awaken the American people to this long-term strategy that’s worked so well for the GOP since 1964, usually producing widespread disenfranchisement and hours-long lines to vote in minority neighborhoods.

The struggle for democracy in our republic is far from over, and the next battlefield will be the election this November. Republicans are doubling down on every tool they’ve ever used to suppress the vote.

I don’t know how many voters were intimidated into not voting by GOP intimidation tactics in 2020 or in 1964. I am pretty sure (~97% confident) that Republican Party elites intended to suppress non-Republican voters[1], but how effective was it? In close races, just a few intimidated voters and suppressed votes can flip an election. 

Videos here and here indicate that since the 1950s, Republicans have tried to intimidate non-Republican voters. For context, 2020 was the first presidential election in 40 years where the Republican National Committee (RNC) was allowed to do “poll watching” without court supervision. The Democratic Party sued the RNC and courts ordered court monitoring of RNC poll watching activity for 40 years because the Republicans were trying to intimidate voters.  

Footnote: 

1. For example, Republicans target polls where non-Republican voters dominate. Their only concern is non-Republican voters, who allegedly commit massive voter fraud. According to Republican elites, Republican voters don’t commit voter fraud, and thus they do not need to be monitored.

Armed Trump supporter arrested at polling place in 2020