According to a Republican Party lawyer who was on the scene that day, before the polls closed, Kelly hightailed it out of the state in a Chevy Impala, armbands and signs stuffed in the trunk. When the Essex County prosecutor’s office launched a statewide criminal investigation the following week, he was nowhere to be found.

In the end, prosecutors didn’t bring charges—no would-be voters stepped forward to say they had been blocked from casting ballots—but the Democratic National Committee filed a federal lawsuit accusing Kelly and the RNC of violating the Voting Rights Act. To settle the case, in 1982 the RNC signed a consent decree, agreeing to end all “ballot security” programs targeting minority precincts. Four years later, the RNC was caught caging minority voters in Louisiana, an effort that was intended to “keep the black vote down,” according to an internal RNC memo. The DNC filed suit again, and a chastened RNC agreed to a modified decree requiring it to submit all plans for anti–voter fraud campaigns to the court for approval.

At which point, the RNC mostly abandoned its anti–voter fraud programs. While state parties and individual candidates continued to launch scattered ballot-security efforts, national attention to voter fraud faded. That is, until the 2000 presidential election. Tova Wang, who was on the staff of the 2001 National Commission on Federal Election Reform and is now a fellow at the public-policy think tank Demos, says that after Bush v. Gore, political strategists took a new interest in the mechanics of elections. “Partisan activists began trying to alter the rules and tinker with election administration to gain partisan advantage,” she told me recently.

Some liberals began pushing for measures (such as Election Day registration) that would lower barriers to voting. Conservatives, on the other hand, took a renewed interest in fighting voter fraud. A raft of new state legislation followed, including voter-ID laws (now on the books in 33 states) and laws requiring people to show proof of citizenship before registering to vote. It’s not clear what problem these measures solve, however. Several exhaustive studies have found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.

Meanwhile, the RNC has tried to get back into the ballot-­security game. In 2008, the party asked Dickinson Debevoise, the New Jersey federal judge who presided over the two 1980s cases, to abolish or modify the decades-old consent decree barring certain anti–voter fraud activities. The RNC argued that the ban had outlived its purpose, but Debevoise was not persuaded, and denied the RNC’s request. (The party appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which affirmed Debevoise’s ruling.) “Minority voters continue to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates,” Debe­voise wrote in his 2009 decision. “As long as that is the case, the RNC and other Republican groups may be tempted to keep qualified minority voters from casting their ballots, especially in light of the razor-thin margin of victory by which many elections have been decided in recent years.”

By this time, Catherine Engelbrecht, the Texas soccer mom, was preparing to take up the cause of ballot security. In the summer of 2009, she and a couple dozen fellow Tea Partiers gathered in the back room of a Houston pub to discuss ways they might channel their political energies. Having grown weary of protest rallies, they hit on various other ideas, including working the polls during that fall’s municipal elections. “We thought, ‘That’s simple enough,’ ” Engelbrecht told me recently. “ ‘We’ll work for a day and check it off our good-citizen list, then move on to something else.’ ”