Vasquez has been meeting with local police in six swing states -- Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia and Florida -- to try to set some ground rules in communities of color before Election Day. His efforts to get police to negotiate and sign memorandums of understanding about how they will engage with voters this fall had similarities to those of protest organizers engaging with law enforcement before holding rallies and demonstrations.
The problem facing both voting rights advocates and officials is not people respectfully exercising their First Amendment rights, but rather with dealing with provocateurs who disrupt events and seek to provoke a police response that interrupts others from exercising those rights, Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University, recently told NPR. "Police know how to handle peaceful protests. The harder part is when you have that gray zone in between, where you have protests that are largely peaceful, but you have people who are behaving in a violent or destructive manner."
When it comes to campaigning and voting on Election Day, there can be several gray zones. The first is where one person's actions in support of a cause -- called electioneering -- are legal but may be intimidating to others who don't share their views or ideology. Then there are clearly intimidating actions that likely violate election or criminal codes, if those actions were being monitored and those laws were being enforced. But people in opposing political parties and local authorities may not see or judge the same actions the same way.
There are a series of state and federal laws that protect voters. The most obvious are buffer zones around the entrances to polls where electioneering is not allowed. These distances are specified in state law and vary, from 10 feet in Pennsylvania, to 40 feet in Virginia, to 100 feet in Wisconsin and Michigan, to 150 feet in Florida and Georgia. There are state and federal laws barring voter intimidation, rules governing the conduct of partisan observers in election sites, and laws outlawing any election-related violence. (On the other hand, it is legal to bring guns into polls in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, gun control groups have reported.)
There were two recent widely reported instances of Trump supporters badgering voters and election officials that illustrate the clear lines and ambiguities that arise as voters and authorities respond to loud but legal electioneering, and to what one seasoned observer concluded was illegal voter intimidation.
A clear line was seen in Philadelphia, where Trump supporters demanded to observe the start of early voting at a satellite voting center just before 2020's first televised presidential debate. Perhaps the gambit was a stunt to give Trump fodder to smear the city's elections, which he did. But local election officials told the Trump supporters that they could not stay because they had not followed the process to become credentialed partisan observers.
A blurrier line emerged during the first weekend of early voting in Fairfax County, Virginia. In that diverse Washington, D.C. suburb, a caravan of Trump supporters drove into the parking lot where voters were lined up at the county's government center, some revving their engines, which upset some voters. A small band of Trump supporters got out of their cars and trucks and converged at a plaza near the entrance, where they waved banners and cheered for Trump. Some voters who felt intimidated alerted officials, who came out, spoke to the campaigners, and then opened the government center so voters could wait inside in the hallways.
"There are two factors that go on that you should be thinking about," said Kevin Kennedy, who was Wisconsin's top statewide election official from 1982 to 2016 and a lawyer. "There's the electioneering factor, which is trying to influence voting. 'Don't vote for that jerk,' 'Vote for this party,' or whatever. And in Wisconsin, that [electioneering] stops 100 feet from the entrance of any building containing a polling place with the exception of a sign on private property."
"The second factor is you cannot interfere with the orderly conduct of the election," he said. "The general definition of disorderly conduct is something that tends to disturb the peace or create an issue" I would say that driving a truck through a parking lot [to disrupt waiting voters], even if you are more than 100 feet away, would probably qualify [as intimidation]. The question then is resource allocation for law enforcement."
Kennedy's last point highlights another gray zone that affects when and where police might step in -- if they were present or were called upon to do so.
Election officials have narrower authority than the police to deal with bad behavior as it moves from the polls to the street. Kennedy concluded that Trump supporters toying with Fairfax County voters outside of Virginia's 40-foot electioneering boundary was illegal voter intimidation, but it did not prompt arrests. Since the incident, county officials are seeking to extend the buffer zone to 150 feet.
"We need individuals to use their discretion in a way that promotes democracy," said the Advancement Project's Vasquez. "I've seen in 2018 in Florida, voters come with horses waving an American flag where there are people with long lines, similar to the pickup trucks [in Fairfax County]. It is fact-specific and looking at the totality of the circumstances."
What Kind of Police Presence?How visible police should be at polls, especially in communities in color, is a complicated question.
"The polling station has historically been a militarized space for Black voters," said Jeralyn Cave, Vasquez's colleague and Advancement Project spokeswoman, citing America's history of white vigilantes, segregation, Jim Crow and recent partisan voter suppression.
"So many people [police] don't want to use their discretion as it relates to elections," Vasquez said. "But any other time, they are willing to use their discretion. Most recently, I think what we could compare it to is we have millions of people storming the street to practice their First Amendment right to peaceful[ly] protest [police brutality]. And we have some police officers who are deciding that, 'You know what, you guys are in a group during a pandemic, and we're going to use our discretion to either charge you with something or not charge you with something.'"
The question, then, becomes one of nuance. What can government officials do now to assure voters in battleground states that voting this fall will be safe? Vasquez has been trying to negotiate ground rules with police in communities of color in swing states. But as of October 2, Cave said that no law enforcement agency had signed any memorandum of understanding.
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