Gitlin-Adam

consulted experts indicates its authors did not even speak with First Amendment scholars, who
might also have cabined “intimidation” with rules on permissible electioneering, or Second
Amendment advocates, who might have urged some accommodation of right-to-carry gun laws
in spite of slight voter discomfort.
Even if the authors had cast a wider net, the variation in viewpoints is understandable,
because the focus is primarily legalistic. Some focus on requirements of acts like violence, which
other laws already prohibit. Others point to legislatively enacted voting restrictions, which may
be anti-voter on their own merits but in many cases would be better characterized as the result of
policy disagreements. Neither approach accurately reflects the underlying norm.
What drives the proscription of voter intimidation is the notion that the exercise of the
right to vote should be, from the perspective of the voter, unfettered—lines should be short, the
process should make sense, and there should be no outside impediment. This is why in almost all
voter-intimidation statutes, state and federal, liability turns on whether the conduct threatens or
coerces a voter in such a way that “interferes” with voting (Weiser and Gitlin 2016). These
statutes implicitly recognize that voting often derives not only (or even necessarily mostly) from
calm rational thought, but from “hot cognition”—increasingly, we recognize that voting turns on
feelings (Lodge and Taber 2013, Pew Research Center 2016b). Intimidation and discrimination
create roadblocks to an activity intended to be swift and simple, regardless of how much
deliberation preceded exercise of the voter’s rights.
Viewing aspects of voting as turning on feelings is consistent with contemporary efforts
to reconceptualize what motivates voters. For example, recent research on why people vote has
attempted to harness the teachings of field experiments in voter-mobilization methods, where
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