Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avrogant.

We continue with our series of episodes that look at stories from the past that may

resonate with this year's midterm election. Maybe you're listening to this just a day

before election day or on election day itself, But today we are going to New Jersey to

1981 to a gubernatorial election in which Republicans were convinced that

Democrats were going to cheat in the vote and as a result

established a number of tactics especially on or around election day to intimidate

voters mostly black and Latino voters. We'll get into some of the details which are really, really wild.

People riding around wearing fake armbands asking black voters who they're going to vote for

while they're standing in line.

But look, we wanted to do this story, which has been on our list for a while.

We wanted to do it now because it may resonate with how Election Day is playing out this year.

There is, of course, already lots of distrust and accusations of cheating and there are already stories. course already

stories of

stories of intimidation tactics and attempts to suppress the vote.

And I'll just say it, most this is being done as it was in 1981

by the Republican Party. So there is a

connection from 1981 to today and of course there's a connection from 1981 back

through history when we think about the Civil Rights era and voter

intimidation and then poll taxes and all sorts of stuff going into the 19th century.

It's a good thing we have a historian of the 19th century and a historian of the 20th century here with us as always in the 21st century

...