Gitlin-Adam

polls (New York Times 1918). Blanket challenges, as scores of interviews in these cases and
others confirm, have the potential to make voters feel intimidated.
Coordinated and overt voter intimidation may seem less flagrant in the modern era, but
now arises more often in the form of so-called “ballot security operations” (Weiser and
Agraharkar 2012). These are coordinated efforts ostensibly aimed at preventing voter fraud, but
that have been accused of being little more than pretext for discouraging voting through
intimidation.
Berry (1996) and others have documented some of the most striking examples of
coordinated ballot-security operations, such as the 1981 Republican National Committee
operation in New Jersey. During that year’s gubernatorial campaign, in the name of ensuring the
election’s integrity and preventing voter fraud, the RNC hired a “Ballot Security Task Force” to
challenge voters’ eligibility in areas that were predominantly populated by African American and
Latino voters. This “Task Force” also deployed off-duty law enforcement officers to patrol
racially targeted precincts, carrying firearms, and stopping and asking questions of voters while
at polling places. As with most ballot-security operations, the evidence of fraud to justify the
conduct was practically nonexistent. A court has continued to extend the resulting consent
decree, which limits RNC Election Day activities, in response to repeated showings that it has
violated the decree through ballot-security operations that are discriminatory and intimidating
(Weiser and Gitlin 2016).
More recently, the United States v. Nguyen case chronicles how in 2006, in a California
congressional election, a professional mailing service connected to a candidate sent letters to
roughly 14,000 newly registered voters with Hispanic surnames. The letters advised them in
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