Democracy Decoded: Season 4, Episode 6 Transcript

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Simone Leeper: In 2021, a Colorado voter named Michelle Garcia opened her front door to two strange men. They were at her home to grill her about how she had voted in the 2020 election.

Garcia: His specific questions were, "Did you vote by mail-in ballot? How many times have you voted?" He wanted to know who I voted for, who I supported.

Leeper: As she later told NPR, the incident unsettled her.

Garcia: They were very aggressive. There was no boundaries with their ethics or with civility.

Leeper: But she was far from alone. Too many American voters face some form of intimidation during or after the 2020 election. In my home state and county in Florida ...

News Clip: Possible voter intimidation happening in Pinellas County. Two people who claimed to be security guards were seen monitoring an early voting site over in St. Pete.

Simone Leeper: In Arizona ...

News Clip: The Sheriff's Office was actually called out to this location in Mesa recently. Reports of people carrying guns in this parking lot as they watched people turn in their ballots.

Leeper: In Maryland ...

News Clip: They're in custody here at the Frederick County Detention Center, charged with both voter intimidation and threatening candidates. The man in this video, recorded as he allegedly left a threatening letter at the home of Mark Postoma and his wife, earlier this month.

Leeper: And elsewhere. In Weld County, Colorado, people complained to officials that strangers were showing up at the door to quiz them about how they had voted in the last presidential election.

Carly Koppes: Some of them weren't so nice when they approached those voters and were very intimidating with how hostile they did get.

Leeper: This is Carly Koppes. She's been the clerk and recorder in Weld County for about 10 years.

Koppes: They did try to play it off to these voters that they were doing official business for us, which was the furthest thing from the truth.

Leeper: Voters called Carly's office to ask what was going on, and she helped to escalate the issue to the attention of other county and state officials. It was the first time in her nearly two decades of working in government that she'd seen such a spate of voter intimidation.

Koppes: Prior to 2020, if there was voter intimidation going on, it never raised to the level that we needed to engage or that voters felt to let us know.
Since 2020, just because people had such big questions around the validity of the election, that's what led to some of these groups to get this idea that they should do some canvassing, some post-election polling or verification. After 2020 is when we did see those efforts, not only in Colorado, but really across the nation.

Leeper: I'm Simone Leeper, and this is Democracy Decoded. A podcast where we examine our government and discuss innovative ideas that could lead to a stronger, more transparent, accountable, and inclusive democracy. I work for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, an organization that advocates for every voter in America to be able to meaningfully participate in the democratic process. I'm an attorney on CLC's redistricting team, representing voters import across the country who want our democracy to be better and more representative. 

On this season of the podcast, we're examining American elections. We're taking a deep dive into the tried and tested systems, and some of the newly updated laws, that ensure our elections are safe, secure, and accurate, no matter what challenges they face. 

In this episode, we're looking squarely at voter intimidation. The United States is the world's oldest continuously functioning democracy. And unfortunately, it has a long history of people trying to coerce or frighten voters. But that also means we've built up a system of strong defenses over the years, which we will get to later in the episode. For now, it's important to know that voter intimidation can happen before, during, and after election day. And that it's illegal. Whether you're voting in-person, by mail, or via election drop box, you should never be made to feel unsafe or intimidated while casting your ballot. 

Now, let's head back to Northeast Colorado, Carly Koppes' home turf.

Koppes: Weld County, we're just under 4000-square-miles. I usually tease my election officials in Rhode Island that my whole county can consume your whole state. We've got both urban and very rural areas. We go all the way down to the Denver metro area, but then we go up further north to the Wyoming and Nebraska area. That is where there are going to be more cows, and beets, and corn than there are people.

Leeper: Carly has worked for Weld County for 20 years. For even longer, she's volunteered at the county's big annual rodeo, the Greeley Stampede.

Koppes: I'm a rodeo girl. I've rodeoed and showed horses all my life. The Greeley Stampede is phenomenal. We got the carnival, we got concerts.

Leeper: Most of Carly's duties in Weld County aren't the stuff of headlines. Her office handles driver's licenses and license plates. They record deeds and trusts of oil and gas leases. And they handle civil unions and marriage licenses.

Koppes: We leave the divorce part to the courts, so we do the happy part.

Leeper: In other words, most of what she handles are normal government functions. Which is what made the door knocking incidents of 2022 so unusual. 

A group that was concerned about the 2020 election results fanned out to approach voters in their homes. It was almost a warped version of an election audit, fueled by false narratives and misinformation.

Koppes: It definitely wasn't like walking in a precinct for a campaign asking for support, which is all done prior to the election. This was definitely more set in the tone of really trying to see if voters would be willing to tell them if they voted for such-and-such candidate or not. 

We were able to get a copy of the questions. They definitely were on that borderline of how your tone and how you address somebody could be very intimidating. If they weren't able to answer, they just kept drilling and drilling. Finally, most of the people were going, "Yeah, nope. We got to shut this conversation off. I'm shutting my door and you can leave my house now."

Leeper: Voters understood that something shady was taking place. Carly's office started getting calls.

Koppes: A couple of the voters that I had personal one-on-one conversations with, they were really feeling frustrated. They were very upset that somebody was coming back after all these months and trying to figure out who they voted for for president. They were like, "That's my vote and I don't need to tell anybody." Then, “Was that a set-up? If I tell you if I voted for the candidate you didn't want me to vote for, are you going to come back and harass my house?”

Leeper: When voters reported the incidents, they often asked a question. "Were these guys from the county clerk's office?" The door knockers had implied that they were. Carly was emphatic in her reply.

Koppes: We were not involved at all here in Weld County. But they did try to play it off to these voters that they were doing official business for us. It did cause a little bit of alarm for some of our voters, they did call in. We did have a conversation with them and we told them, "You're more than welcome to have a conversation with your local police department or the sheriffs as well." I'm very thankful for the voters that did reach out to my office and myself to make us aware, so we could put out some information saying, "Hey, wait a second. You don't have any pressure or any type of requirement to tell people how you voted. We have a constitutional right to have a private ballot. So make sure, if you want to stay that way, you just don't have to answer these people's questions."

Leeper: The level of suspicion that some Americans have about elections may feel new, a byproduct of conspiracy theory paranoia that we all navigate now. Another obstacle to having fair and secure elections. But the American story of voter intimidation also goes back much further.

Jonathan Diaz: The United States, unfortunately, has a pretty long and sordid history of voter intimidation, dating back probably to the beginning of this country. But in particular, during the reconstruction period following the US Civil War.

Leeper: This is Jonathan Diaz, my colleague at CLC. He's our Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships. He works with our partners across the country to expand access to voting, and protect elections from sabotage and manipulation. He points to the election of 1870. With the passage of the 15th Amendment, Black men for the first time had the freedom to vote. Immediately, racist reactionary groups set out to stop them.

Diaz: Armed bands of private citizens, militia groups, the Ku Klux Klan really made it their mission to, through threats of violence, and intimidation, and harassment, discourage Black Americans and political allies from participating in US elections.

Das: With the 15th Amendment, we saw Black men were given the right to vote. But the right was limited and for many, non-existent. We saw targeted efforts to suppress that power through poll taxes, literacy tests, outright fraud, violence.

Leeper: This is Christina Das, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She's a lawyer who focuses on protecting the freedom to vote for Black Americans in the Deep South. Like Jonathan, she draws a line from today's voter intimidation right back to reconstruction and the era's attacks against new enfranchised Black men and their political allies.

Das: Leading up to the 1868 presidential election, there were outright violence and attacks in both Kansas and Georgia resulting in more than 2000 politically motivated murders. Then, of course, we know about the infamous 1873 Louisiana incident known as the Colfax Massacre, in which former Confederate soldiers and KKK members ultimately killed nearly 150 African Americans simply for the tense and contested nature of the 1872 gubernatorial election.

Leeper: The federal government fought back against the terror. President Ulysses S. Grant, appalled at reports of Ku Klux Klan atrocities from the South, urged Congress to protect people's constitutional rights. The resulting enforcement acts of 1870 and 1871 empowered the federal government to protect Black Americans from violence and establish penalties for interfering with their freedom to vote.

Diaz: The federal government has enacted and enforced protections against voter intimidation since the 1860s and '70s, and has expanded on those protections through things like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I'm sure most folks are familiar with the images of the Civil Rights movement, of not only private citizens, but also law enforcement and state governments, using the threat of violence, or in some cases actual violence, to discourage, deter, or forcibly prevent some segments of the population from exercising their constitutional right to cast a ballot.

Leeper: Black voters weren't the only people whose ability to vote was denied. In fact, it took 60 years after the Civil War before the federal government extended the rights of citizenship to Native Americans who maintained tribal ties.

Das: For Indigenous populations, it wasn't until 1924 in the Snyder Act that they were granted the right to vote. That should have actually been guaranteed by the 15th Amendment. Yet, states and localities continued to disenfranchise tribal people.

Leeper: Even after the Snyder Act, it took another 24 years before every state recognized the right of all Indigenous citizens to vote.

Das: In the late 1930s in Maine, city officials explicitly told Indigenous would-be voters that, "We don't want you people over here. You have your own elections over on the island. If you want to vote, go vote over there." 

Today, that's commonly in the form of election officials failing to recognize tribal IDs as a method for voter validation. While it might seem simple, it might seem on its face to be race-neutral, it is deeply, deeply intimidating for individuals from the tribal community to travel long distances to be able to vote, bring their tribal ID, and then have it not recognized.

Leeper: The Voting Rights Act of 1965, as Jonathan mentioned, changed a law. That landmark civil rights law, along with the Civil Rights Act of 1957, protect voters from actual or attempted intimidation, threats, or coercion. 

Partly as a result of these laws, modern intimidation doesn't look like the mob violence of reconstruction, or the lynchings of the Jim Crow era. Instead, in most cases, voter intimidation has become more sly.

Das: Looking back to the Civil Rights era, we know that anti-voter groups launched Operation Eagle Eye, a campaign against mainly Latinx communities at the time. This operation included various voter suppression tactics, including sending poll watchers to the polls to challenge voter eligibility, something that might sound very familiar to folks today. 

In 1981, we saw various national ballot security tasks force launched, targeting both Black voters and Latin voters. There has been a wave of disinformation that Latin voters in particular are facing, tied to their ability to either get asylum, or if they are asylum recipients and new citizens.

Leeper: People who don't speak English as a first language are at particular risk of facing intimidation. Those tactics also don't have to be overt. Rather, a city might quietly withhold election materials, or translators that a state's government paid to provide.

Das: We also know that our Asian American neighbors and their descendants were denied citizenship and voting rights under law. We know that this country explicitly passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the 1924 Immigration Act. All of this stopped the naturalization of many Asian migrants. Similar to the Latin population, boards of election often overlooked and misdirected language resources that were helpful or necessary for Asian American voters. We have seen misappropriation of the Voting Rights Act and requirements under the Voting Rights Act in language accessibility requirements, by way of states and localities not meeting the threshold for accessibility when it comes to election materials.

Leeper: People from racial and immigrant groups aren't the only communities that face voter intimidation. Election watch dogs also have noted the systemic targeting of LGBTQ voters.

Das: We know that for transgender adults, they oftentimes are not voting out of fear of being harassed due to their sexual identity or gender identity. For BIPOC members of the LGBTQ+ community, this number is even higher, for the fear intimidation that's going on in this community. 

There were direct examples that I witnessed in Texas in the 2022 and 2023 elections, where transgender individuals were denied the right to vote based on their ID not matching the voter rolls.

Leeper: The story of voter intimidation in America isn't just one straight line. Instead, the story of voter intimidation, and the fight against it, is one of evolving rights and protections. As different Americans gain the full rights of citizenship, other people put up obstacles. Eventually, the law addresses those obstacles. But then, intimidation tactics shift.

Diaz: Voter intimidation has continued to be a problem for American democracy up until the present day, but it often looks a little different than the kind of historical images that we are used to.

Leeper: Jonathan Diaz again, of CLC.

Diaz: Technology has really changed the way that voter intimidation looks. A lot of it happens through online harassment, doxxing, the publishing of people's personal information as a deterrent or a punishment for voting or not voting a certain way. It's a real problem, because if people are too scared to participate, if people are discouraged because they feel like they're not safe, then our democracy is not really reflecting the preferences and the voices of every American voter the way that it's intended to.

Leeper: 150 years ago, former Confederate soldiers might have physically confronted would-be voters. Now, bad actors can also use automated means to discourage people from going to the polls.

Diaz: Recently, some of the new methods of voter intimidation really rely on technology and new methods of reaching voters in ways that they might not expect or might not realize have anything to do with the election. 

In 2020, for example, there were a couple of actors who sent out robocalls targeting primarily Black voters with misinformation about whether their health or financial records would be made public if they voted. Trying to discourage people from voting because of not necessarily physically violent, but intrusive consequences. Those individuals who orchestrated those robocalls were charged with federal crimes under federal voter intimidation statutes. These kind of misleading technology and information driven tactics are relatively new. And they are coupled with some of the tried-and-true tactics of voter intimidation that still persist to this day.

Leeper: Those old tactics still include in-person intimidation. One group of people, generally constrained by the law out of concerns they would discourage voters, are poll watchers. Christina Das tells people not to get them confused with people who work at the polls, because the difference is huge.

Das: Election clerks and poll workers are inside of the polling place and outside. They move around, make sure that the polling place is operating on time, well-staff, and all election administration duties are happening. Poll watchers are not hired by the county or paid by the board of elections. They do not need to reside in that county. And they are most often affiliated or are appointed by political parties, candidates, or campaign committees. Meaning an issue, if it's on the ballot, or a ballot referendum. They could be paid by a PAC, a candidate, or a campaign.

Leeper: It's important to remember that poll watchers have a right to be there, and obviously most are not there to hassle voters. But in recent years, voters have become wary of poll watchers who make them nervous, or who hover close to voting stations. And some states are making it easier, not harder, for poll watchers to potentially encroach on the act of voting.

Das: They should, in most instances, remain outside of the polling place. In certain states, I'm thinking about Texas, in the wake of Senate Bill 1, poll watchers are permitted inside of the polling place. This is something that we are challenging actively in our Senate Bill 1 litigation. 

We're challenging this because, in Senate Bill 1, they can be close enough to see and hear what's going on in the polling place. Which, as you can imagine, can lead to intimidation for voters. If I'm taking my mother to go vote, I might not be comfortable with a stranger being close enough to see and hear what's going on in the ballot box. Poll watchers are often those that are also challenging voter eligibility.

Leeper: Another discouraging trend since 2020 has been, unfortunately, torrid bolder threats, and at least the implicit indication of possible violence.

Diaz: In 2022, in Arizona, you had self-appointed armed militia groups camping out outside of drop box locations, and filming people as they came in to drop their ballots. A judge in Arizona found that to be illegal, intimidating conduct because they were brandishing weapons and filming voters in a way that made very clear that they were trying to keep tabs on who was dropping off ballots and who wasn't, to set them up for future harassment. 

The tactics are broad, but the common element is that they are trying to, through threats, coercion, intimidation, misleading information, prevent or discourage people from voting a certain way, or voting at all.

Leeper: While stories like this may sound scary, remember that, for the most part, voter intimidation remains rare. But it does happen, and if you notice it, there are steps you can take.

Diaz: Voter intimidation is illegal. Every eligible American has the right and the freedom to cast their ballot safely and without fear of intimidation, harassment, or threats of violence. If voters, or anyone, witness an instance of voter intimidation, I would encourage them to report it to the 866-OURVOTE hotline, as well as to local law enforcement or the Department of Justice, as appropriate.

Leeper: By calling the hotline, you can connect directly with election protection lawyers.

Diaz: That hotline is available in English, Spanish, a number of Asian languages, as well as Arabic. Where people can report not only voter intimidation, but also any issues that they have with getting to the polls. Whether they're turned away because a poll worker says they're not registered or don't have the right ID, or if they can't find their polling place, if there's long lines, machines don't work, that is the hotline to call. 

The most important thing, when calling something into 866-OURVOTE, especially when it comes to voter intimidation, is to provide the nonpartisan legal volunteers on that hotline with as much detail as possible about what you've witnessed. Location, time, the exact nature of whatever speech or conduct you observed, what polling place you're at, because that's what's going to help the election protection volunteers not only respond to that particular call, but also to track broader trends within a county or state so that we can interact with election official and lawmakers to address broader system problems during the election as well.

Leeper: You should also let your local election officials know if you see or experience intimidation. 

Carly Koppes, for example, was able to escalate the response to the sketchy door knocking in her county because she had connections with other officials throughout Colorado.

Koppes: If there was a goal behind these canvassers of any type of continuing voter intimidation, I definitely do not think that that worked in our communities here in Weld County. It was unsettling, but then as soon as they cease and desist, our voter turnout has continued to stay steady.

Leeper: In other words, the voters of Weld County didn't let the intimidation impact their future votes.

Koppes: If there's anybody that is trying to block their right to have their voice heard, which is in my opinion, one of the most important rights we have in the United States, make sure and tell us. Say something to your local elections' office. We can make sure that no voter in Weld County, or the state of Colorado, or frankly the nation, doesn't feel like they are able to cast their ballot.

Leeper: The number of people who would harass or intimidate voters is far, far fewer than the number of people at every level of government who want to help you cast your vote. But it's incumbent on all of us to be aware of the bad actors who might try and intimidate us or other voters. 

One scary encounter at a drop box, or a confusing AI-generated call could be all it takes to keep a voter from casting their ballot. But for some voters, especially those in Weld County, Colorado, this won't be their first rodeo. At least they'll have the tools and support from local election officials like Carly to make sure their vote counts. 

I want to thank Carly Koppes, Jonathan Diaz, and Christina Das for appearing in this episode. And credit to the news organizations you heard at the top of this episode covering this issue, NPR, WFTS-TV in Florida, WPNX-TV in Arizona, and WBAL-TV in Maryland. You can find more information on the topics discussed in our show notes, along with the full transcript of the episode. You can learn more about us and support our work at campaignlegal.org. 

This season of Democracy Decoded is produced by JAR Audio for Campaign Legal Center. CLC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advances democracy through law at the federal, state, and local levels, fighting for every American's right to responsive government, and a fair opportunity to participate in and effect the democratic process. You can learn more about us and support our work at campaignlegal.org. 

I'm your host, Simone Leeper. Thanks so much for listening. If you learned something new today, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. And hit subscribe to get updates as we release new episodes. Leading the production for CLC are Casey Atkins, Multimedia Manager, and Matty Tate-Smith, Senior Communications Manager for Elections. This podcast was produced by Sam Eifling and Reaon Ford, edited and mixed by Luke Batiot. Democracy Decoded is a member of the Democracy Group, a network of podcasts dedicated to engaging and civil discourse, inspiring civic engagement, and exploring the future of our democracy. You can learn more at democracygroup.org.