Credit: (AP Photo/Pickoff)Editor’s Note: This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access. The article is available for reprint under the terms of Votebeat’s republishing policy.
Like so many covert political conspiracies hatched in New Jersey, this one took shape at a diner — outside Princeton on Route 1, to be precise — in September of 1981.
It was there that Mercer County Republican Chairman John Hansbury delivered a handwritten Election-Day proposal to Jack Kelly, a dodgy political operative sent by the Republican National Committee to help Tom Kean beat Jim Florio in a hotly contested gubernatorial race.
According to court records obtained by NJ Spotlight News, Kelly’s marching orders were to recruit and dispatch “flying squads” to patrol polling places on Election Day to challenge fraudulent voting in urban, Democratic districts. Hansbury said for $15,000 he could round up some off-duty cops to accompany lawyers do the job in Trenton. Kelly liked the idea, and knocked the price down to $10,000. He then replicated it in Newark, Camden and Atlantic City.
Spoiler alert: It would not end well.
The incident helped launch what has been a rich and somewhat troubling history in New Jersey when it comes to clean elections, with now the 2020 election proving a pivotal test not just here but nationwide.
Today’s presidential election will be the first in four decades in which the national Republican Party will not be constrained by a federal court order that had kept its previous practice of voter suppression tactics in check.
The legal mandate, known as a consent decree, was enacted nationwide in 1982 after Democrats sued Republicans over the blatant intimidation tactics they employed at several polling places in New Jersey’s urban minority communities during that 1981 gubernatorial race.
What happened in 1981
On Election Day, 1981, the squads stationed themselves at polling places — some of them brandishing weapons — ostensibly to ferret out fraudulent voters. They wore black arm bands identifying them as members of the National Ballot Security Task Force. They posted illegal signs warning voters that they could be arrested for violating election laws.
“Warning: This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force,” read the signs. “It is a crime to falsify a ballot or violate election laws.”
And they confronted Black and brown citizens coming to vote — people like Trenton resident Lynette Monroe, who when she arrived at her polling site was stopped outside by a member of the task force. According to the lawsuit which would follow, Monroe was asked if she had her voter registration card with her. She said she did not but that it didn’t matter — she was a registered voter. But the National Ballot Security Task Force members “turned her away, preventing her from casting her ballot,” according to a lawsuit later filed by the Democratic Party, Monroe, and several others.
It was not an isolated incident.
Around midday on Nov. 3, 1981, the phone at Kean headquarters in Union started ringing off the hook, Kean press secretary Carl Golden recalls. Overwhelmed, the receptionist told Golden reporters were calling to ask about a bevy of intimidation incidents at polling places around the state. The flying squads were raising hell, and Golden didn’t have a clue what they were. Soon, he was informed that it was being orchestrated by the RNC. (Golden is a regular columnist for NJ Spotlight News.)
Golden stormed into the adjacent office where the RNC had set up shop. There sat Jack Kelly, wearing cowboy boots and his own task force arm band, and with a walkie-talkie. Golden describes him today as “a complete psychopath … a short, rotund guy nobody trusted or liked … a guy who could strut while sitting down.”
“What the f—- are you guys doing!?” Golden screamed. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
The next day, it became Golden’s job, he said, “to sweep up the broken glass” and find Kelly.
Like something ‘out of a cheap novel’
“So, I called the RNC,” Golden recalls, “and asked them, ‘Where’s Jack Kelly?” There was a long silence. … Finally they said, ‘He’s out of New Jersey. He’s in a very small motel in a very small town in Oklahoma.’”
Golden was stunned. “You guys are out of a cheap novel,” he said.
The National Ballot Security Task Force and its strong-arm tactics got all the headlines. The other part of their mission was equally sinister but not as sexy. It was the tried and true campaign tactic called “voter caging.”
Kelly and his team purchased Democratic voter registration lists for the targeted cities and mailed 200,000 do-not-forward postcards to the predominately Hispanic and Black districts in New Jersey. About 45,000 cards were returned, and they were then used to create a list of voters for the GOP to challenge at the polls.
There was one glaring problem, as pointed out in the Democrats’ complaint: Kelly’s list was old and outdated, which meant an unusually large portion of the people may have been wrongly targeted.
When Kean squeaked in
Kean won the election by the smallest margin in New Jersey history — 1,797 votes — but the Democrats immediately sued the Republican National Committee and the state GOP, claiming blatant abuses of the 1964 Voting Rights Act. Their evidence was compelling enough to force the RNC to settle and submit to a federal consent decree that would prohibit such behavior throughout the United States for the next 36 years.
In 2009, the RNC petitioned the court to end the consent decree. Federal Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise denied the request, but ruled that the decree would terminate at the end of 2017.
The decree’s end was much to the delight of Republicans and the equal concern of Democrats, whose fears appear well-founded.
President Trump’s call to resurrect his own super-sized version of the “flying squads” has been incessant and loud. Earlier this year, the RNC and the Trump campaign announced that they would spend $20 million to litigate initiatives like vote-by-mail and that they would recruit 50,000 poll watchers across 15 states.
Angelo Genova, a prominent Democratic election law attorney in New Jersey, was a young untested lawyer three years out of law school in 1981. He was one of the authors of the original complaint that led to the consent decree, and has been involved in subsequent extensions and expansions of the court order.
Fears of ongoing erosion of voting rights
He thinks the recent revocation of the decree comes at a time when it is needed more than ever; and even worse, is just one example of what he sees as the erosion of voting rights in America.
“Who would have imagined that our own president, now the uncontested leader of the RNC, would publicly embrace the kind of intimidating rhetoric and encourage like tactics to those which spawned the 1982 New Jersey lawsuit?” Genova said in an interview.
“The decree’s absence today is a tragedy, right up there with the systematic dismantling of the Voting Rights Act by our U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder, and no different than the numerous state legislative initiatives adopted in Shelby’s aftermath making it harder for persons of color and the poor to vote.“
Republicans agree with Genova on one point — that the end of the decree changed the playing field.
Last year, Justin Clark, a senior lawyer with the 2020 Trump campaign put it this way at a private meeting with his brethren: “First and foremost: The consent decree is gone,” he said, and that is a “huge, huge, huge, huge, deal.” Republicans would now have “a much bigger program, much more aggressive program, a better-funded program” to fight voter fraud than ever before.
What’s happening in Pennsylvania
It is playing out just across the Delaware River in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. There, the Trump campaign has dispatched its officials to early voting sites in Philadelphia, video recorded voters and have demanded that election administrators stop people from dropping more than one ballot to a drop box.
“A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Trump said Monday during a stop in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”
The tactics have drawn a reprimand from the Pennsylvania attorney general, who warned that these present-day flying squad members risk being charged with voter intimidation. Undaunted, the Trump campaign is running a similar operation in Delaware County, a Philadelphia suburb that has been trending Democratic since the 2016 election.
The Trump strategy is playing out in other states as well, including Florida, Texas and Nevada.
Even Roger Stone, who ran Kean’s 1981 campaign before earning the mantle of America’s ultimate dirty trickster, has reemerged.
The reemergence of Roger Stone
During his Sept. 10 appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Stone said “the ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state” because “they are completely corrupted,” adding, “we can prove voter fraud in the absentees right now.”
Stone’s longtime association with Trump, which began in New Jersey, has become legendary. Earlier this year, the president commuted Stone’s prison sentence after he was convicted of federal charges related to the 2016 campaign.
Credit: (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)Stone, Kean’s top campaign strategist in 1981, has denied he was aware of the National Ballot Security Task Force operation, a claim questioned by many insiders. If it wasn’t Stone, it was certainly “Stone-esque,” said Roger Bodman, Kean’s campaign director.
In 2016, the RNC was going to great lengths to distance itself from its decades of voter suppression efforts. Instead, those tactics were left to the Trump campaign itself — with some help from Stone’s Stop the Steal super PAC, which hired “Vote Protectors” to oversee the November 2016 elections.
Add former Gov. Jim Florio to the list of those convinced that Stone was involved in a voter suppression operation, which he firmly believes cost him the election in 1981.
Florio decided at that time it would be better to constrain Republicans from employing such tactics in the future, rather than litigating the election results. Indeed, the consent decree was incrementally expanded and extended over the next four decades, as Genova and the Democrats hauled their counterparts back into court and provided additional evidence of voter intimidation and electoral interference. By all accounts, the RNC was forced into good behavior.
Ending consent decree ‘was a very big mistake’
But ending that decree, Florio says, “was a very big mistake.” He said the Republican Party is more prone to voter suppression and intimidation today than it ever has been. “In recent years, those efforts include closing polling places, reducing voting hours and imposing ridiculously strict voter ID laws,” he said.
“Now our president and his attorney general are leading the way,” Florio says. Unable to land enough votes to win an election, he said their strategy is obvious: “Shrink turnout.”
The voter caging and intimidation tactics exposed in the New Jersey 1981 election can be traced back to 1958, when the Arizona Republican Party mailed do-not-forward campaign literature to 8,000 Democrats in that year’s congressional races. The GOP used the returned mail caging list to launch blanket challenges in heavily minority precincts.
A young Republican lawyer name William Rehnquist was involved in that ballot security operation in Arizona in 1958. Witnesses testified that Rehnquist had personally administered literacy tests to Black and Hispanic voters at predominantly minority precincts in Phoenix. They claimed he challenged their qualifications by asking them to read portions of the Constitution.
The RNC took the Arizona operation nationwide in 1962 with “Operation Eagle Eye,” the nation’s first large‐scale anti–voter fraud campaign. They put Rehnquist in charge, and Operation Eagle Eye was codified in the 1964 RNC Ballot Security Manual. It was then the GOP adopted the term “flying squads” into its strategic vernacular. In 1964, tens of thousands of volunteers showed up at polling places, mostly in urban Democratic strongholds, to challenge voters’ eligibility. They came armed with cameras and two‐way radios.
Later, after Rehnquist was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, he undermined a number of civil rights laws, including the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also left a lasting impression on one of his law clerks — John Roberts, who was to become Chief Justice.
At the time Democrats had filed their complaint regarding the National Ballot Security Task Force operation in New Jersey in 1981, Roberts was settling into a new job at the Justice Department after his Supreme Court clerkship. As special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, he was tasked with addressing voting rights and orchestrating an abrupt change in DOJ policy.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision
Roberts sent an ominous memo to Smith, detailing a sophisticated legal strategy to dramatically narrow the scope of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. When Roberts became Chief Justice in 2005, his views on voting rights hadn’t changed. In his explosive 2013 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts struck down one of the law’s most important provisions — the formula that determined which states had to receive federal approval for their elections.
“Things have changed dramatically” since 1965, Roberts wrote, and went on to explain that America no longer subscribed to the overt racism that spawned the Voting Rights Act. The United States, he declared, has become a post-racial, colorblind society.
Hours after Roberts’ decision was released, North Carolina GOP officials pounced, announcing plans for a new law to curtail early voting, require ID at polling places and end same-day voter registration.
In 2009, New Jersey attorney Genova saw this game-changing decision coming in the arguments presented by Republicans to end the 1982 consent decree. They argued that “with an African-American President, and an African-American Attorney General, the laws that are already on the books regarding voter fraud, voter intimidation, and voter suppression are going to be actively pursued by this Justice Department.” The RNC also argued that since its own chairman, Michael Steele, was Black, the RNC would be unlikely to engage in minority voter suppression.
The judge rejected the argument, but Genova was concerned. “It was the pre-cursor to Shelby,” he said.
Former Gov. Florio thinks the Trump strategy is backfiring on him. He cites the huge number of absentee and early votes already cast in the general election. He cites the Black Lives Matter movement, the largest protest in American history. “The people are rejecting these tactics,” he said. “I remain optimistic.”
As for Carl Golden, Kean’s press secretary, he ended up marrying that overwhelmed receptionist, Linda, who was besieged with phone calls at Kean headquarters on Election Day 1981. Their marriage outlasted the consent decree.