Republican-dominated state legislatures have adopted partisan-minded ID requirements seemingly calculated to reduce Democratic turnout to manageable proportions. Those laws have been taking their lumps in court, with a number of them put on hold recently.

But laws are only one facet of the war on voting. There is also voter intimidation -- and in that area, the prospects for November look grim. Recently, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Alternet published startling reports about a well-financed group called True the Vote, an outgrowth of a Texas "patriot" group, that plans to flood polling places with poll-watchers who will aggressively challenge voters who strike them as potential "impersonators." The reports detail surprisingly frank discussions of plans -- similar to one the group's forerunner carried out in Texas in 2010 -- to target districts with high percentages of minority voters, and to look for voters who "don't look like" citizens.

We won't know until Election Day whether True the Vote and allied groups will be able to mobilize the one million voter vigilantes they are hoping for. But even a smaller showing could paralyze some polling places. Aggressive vote-challengers have the potential to slow the lines to the point that some voters will leave without casting a ballot.

There's also the ever-present possibility of misleading signs and flyers warning voters of non-existent ID requirements. Judge Robert Simpson of Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court recently enjoined state officials from requiring the IDs specified in that state's strict ID law -- but he explicitly allowed officials to ask for the ID. Officials should give information to those who don't have ID, he said, but allow them to vote. As I learned in the South in 1976, there are ways to "give information" to voters that will send many of them home. In all, the mere reduction in oppressive laws does not mean we won't see an organized, and to some degree successful, effort to disfranchise voters in much of the country.

What can be done? Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) recently asked True to Vote to provide documentation of how it selects voter registrations to challenge. But as a minority member of the House Oversight Committee, Cummings can't issue a subpoena or hold a hearing. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is already grossly overextended with its involvement in Voting Rights Act and redistricting cases.

But there is one remedy specifically aimed at groups of private citizens who band together to intimidate other citizens seeking to exercise their rights. It is called the Ku Klux Klan Act. As Brentin Mock of Colorlines pointed out yesterday, the Act directly addresses this kind of organized vote suppression.

Passed in 1871, the applicable part of the Act is currently codified at Title 42 of the United States Code, § 1985(3):

If two or more persons in any State or Territory conspire or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws . . . or if two or more persons conspire to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner. . . [and] one or more persons engaged therein do, or cause to be done, any act in furtherance of the object of such conspiracy, whereby another is injured in his person or property, or deprived of having and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States, the party so injured or deprived may have an action for the recovery of damages occasioned by such injury or deprivation, against any one or more of the conspirators.

What this antique statutory language means is that if ordinary, private people agree to go out and try to stop people from voting, and then carry out their plan, anyone whom they injure may have a right to take them to federal court for damages, and injunctions, and attorney fees.