Georgetown Law
Technology Review

From Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era, voter intimidation typically took the form of flagrant, violent targeting of blacks and their political supporters.1See RAYFORD W. LOGAN, THE BETRAYAL OF THE NEGRO: FROM RUTHERFORD B. HAYES TO WOODROW WILSON 57 (1954) (“[T]he fear of potential, and in some instances actual, intimidation prevented most Negroes from voting in the South . . . .”); see also id. at 378 (“Negroes, moreover, suffered open or concealed intimidation when they tried to vote.”). However, in recent decades, those attempting to suppress the vote have embraced more subtle, cynical, and creative methods.2Ben Cady & Tom Glazer, Voters Strike Back: Litigating Against Modern Voter Intimidation, 39 N.Y.U. REV. L. & SOC. CHANGE 173, 215 (2015). Increasingly, voters are being subjected to false information about voter requirements, aggressive questioning about citizenship, and anonymous threats of harm designed to deter them from voting.3Voter Intimidation, ACLU, https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_pdf_file/kyr-voterintimidation-v03.pdf [https://perma.cc/ZQ87-R5SJ]; see also Cady & Glazer, supra note 2, at 215.

As part of this transition to more inconspicuous forms of voter intimidation, individuals and political organizations have largely supplanted local law-enforcement officials and white-supremacist groups as the main perpetrators.4See Cady & Glazer, supra note 2, at 215; but see Bob Herbert, Editorial, A Chill in Florida, N.Y . TIMES (Aug. 23, 2004), https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/opinion/a-chill-in-florida.html (describing Florida state troopers’ interrogation of elderly black men and women in their homes as part of a voter fraud investigation) [https://perma.cc/6USZ-K8AR]. Instead of polling places, these actors have taken to Internet platforms to suppress the franchise of minority voters. And for good reason: platforms are optimally suited for voter intimidation. Internet platforms allow for anonymous speech, amplify and polarize narratives, and can be manipulated through use of bots.5Phillip N. Howard, How Political Campaigns Weaponize Social Media Bots, IEEE SPECTRUM (Oct. 18, 2018, 3:00 PM), https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/how-political-campaigns-weaponize-social-media-bots [https://perma.cc/5VJJ-EMB5] (“‘Bots’ are just bits of software used to automate and scale up repetitive processes, such as following, linking, replying, and tagging on social media. [T]hey can . . . affect public discourse by pushing content from extremist, conspiratorial, or sensationalist sources, or by pumping out thousands of pro-candidate or anti-opponent tweets a day. These automated actions can give the false impression of a groundswell of support, muddy public debate, or overwhelm the opponent’s own messages.”). The opaque environments these platforms form make it difficult for voters to confidently calculate risks to their safety and freedom when crowd-sourced threats and deception loom large.

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