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ANALYSIS: Poll observers are bad — because 45 years ago in New Jersey the GOP did something
Back in 2020, Rutgers American Studies Professor Mark Krasovic not once, but twice, took to the pages of The Conversation to warn about Donald Trump’s alleged “voter intimidation” tactics of stationing poll watchers at Election Day polling places.
Krasovic’s August 10 piece of that year — “Armed poll watchers: New Jersey’s cautionary tale ahead of the 2020 presidential election” — was repackaged a month and a half later after the president’s debate with Joe Biden.
When queried at that debate, Trump said he’d “urg[e] my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully” if there was a “prolonged vote-counting period.”
“[To] some” Krasovic wrote, “the image of thousands of Trump supporters crowding into polling places to monitor voters looks like voter intimidation, a practice long used in the U.S. by political parties to suppress one side’s vote and affect an election’s outcome.”
The professor then invoked the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial election during which, he claims, the GOP “relied not only on armed poll watchers but also on a history of white vigilantism and intimidation” to help get Tom Kean elected by less than 2,000 votes.
This past Wednesday, Krasovic repackaged the very same piece yet again, albeit with a modified headline: “Armed poll watchers: New Jersey’s 1981 racist voter intimidation campaign is a cautionary tale ahead of 2026 midterms.”
Krasovic’s reformulation now notes the 45-year-old New Jersey “voter suppression efforts resonate today in the midst of Trump’s persistent efforts to suppress the vote and undermine trust in elections nationwide.”
These include “not ruling out” National Guard or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, at midterm election polling places, “leading a comprehensive effort to discredit and suppress mail voting,” and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon noting a “plan to send 1,000 federal election monitors” to various locales across the country.
(The president’s worries about mail-in voting are hardly novel; the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission expressed concerns about the risk of fraud associated with mail-in and absentee ballots over 20 years ago.)
Krasovic, co-organizer of last year’s Rutgers “Racial Justice, Reparations, and the University” event, also points to a CNN report that the Republican National Committee is “training new ‘special monitors’ to scrutinize voting machines.”
“This November, Republican tactics in 1981 are worth remembering,” Krasovic concludes (yet again). “They demonstrate that the safeguarding of polling places from allegedly fraudulent voters and of public places from supposedly threatening people of color share not only a logic. They also share a history.”
MORE: Georgia Southern prof: Trump, GOP peddled racism for mid-term election successes
