What's the Line Between Legal Poll Watching and Illegal Intimidation?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Some voter intimidation is blatant, like the time when off-duty sheriff’s deputies and police officers in New Jersey patrolled predominantly Black and Latino polling places on Election Day while wearing armbands with a made-up name, the National Ballot Security Task Force.

Carrying revolvers and two-way radios on their belts, they questioned voters, ripped down campaign signs and harassed poll workers, all on behalf of the Republican Party, whose candidate for governor won by a razor-thin margin of 1,797 votes.

The New Jersey scheme, which took place in 1981 but is still remembered for its brashness by those who track transgressions at the polls, was clear-cut enough that the Republican National Committee agreed afterward to refrain from targeting minority voters in the name of preventing supposed voter fraud. But just what constitutes unlawful behavior on Election Day can be challenging to define, experts say, and can differ drastically from one jurisdiction to the next.

Is a visible weapon inherently intimidating? What about chanting “four more years” outside a polling place? Or accosting a man helping his disabled mother to vote?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whats-the-line-between-legal-poll-watching-and-illegal-intimidation/ar-BB1axqha?li=BBnb7Kz

[soothsayer]

1. Only official poll watchers can watch polls?

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Yes. Around here you get a certificate issued by your party. Otherwise, you're voting or get out.

[Klaralven]

2. It all depends on state laws

Is there a distinction between "challengers" and "poll watchers"? Is loitering by members of the public allowed? What is allowed to be displayed or handed out? How far from the poll entrance is the non-voting public kept?

[Caliman73]

3. It is different in different jurisdictions, but I think poll observes need to be registered as such.

What I have been hearing from the media, is that typically each party selects poll observes from applications, and they have to be registered to be there legitimately.

There was a big stink from the Orange Idiot last week or so, that "poll watchers" were not being allowed into Philadelphia, but the truth is that there had been NO poll observers registered and accepted by either party. Some Republican assholes were trying to go into polling locations to intimidate workers setting up the locations for the election.


Electioneering is illegal I think in almost every jurisdiction. You cannot be within 100 feet of a polling location promoting any candidate. They tried to get Bill Clinton on that in 2016 because he stopped to sign autographs and was talking to people outside where he went to vote.

[MineralMan]

4. Like just about everything having to do with elections,

state laws rule. I don't know the laws in most states, but in Minnesota, the only challengers to people who are voting are one person appointed by each major party at a polling place. Those legal challengers are not allowed to speak to a voter or interfere with the voter in any way. Only if they know personally that an individual voter is ineligible to vote can they challenge that voter to an election judge.

Beyond those individual challengers, nobody else is allowed to be in the polling place except election officials, voters, and people vouching for those who are registering at the polls for the first time. If someone is assisting a disabled voter, they, too, are allowed in the polling place. Everyone else must stay at least 100' from the door going into the polling place.

That's the law in Minnesota. Those laws will be enforced, but it is very, very rare than any enforcement is needed.