“All you got to do is open your jacket and you see the badge on the belt, right?”

That’s how Mike Rogers, Michigan’s Republican Senate candidate, described what he wanted off-duty police officers to do at Detroit’s polling places.

Rogers told Kalamazoo County Republicans that he had asked the Republican National Committee to “put police officers — retired or off-duty police officers — as our poll watchers in Detroit. Because go ahead: Try to intimidate them. Please.”

He made this request because he didn’t want to “go to bed at 2 a.m. a winner and wake up at 4 a.m. a loser.”

Rogers presents himself to Michigan voters as a traditional, old-school Republican: Trump-adjacent rather than pure MAGA. When it comes to voting rights, his own words say otherwise.

After losing his 2024 Senate race, he falsely claimed that a van full of ballots in Detroit had cost him the election. This summer, he earned Trump’s endorsement. Now Rogers wants cops at the polls.

Trump has been trying to suppress voting in new ways: executive orders that courts have blocked as unconstitutional, attempts to co-opt the Postal Service, and, most recently, using the Justice Department to threaten voters and election officials.

Rogers’s approach is older. It is traditional Republican thuggishness dating back to the early 1980s.

Shortly after Ronald Reagan took office, the RNC built a program to target minority voters for intimidation and suppression. On Election Day 1981, it showed what it could do in New Jersey’s off-year gubernatorial election.

The RNC spent $75,000 to station off-duty police officers at polling places in heavily Black and Latino precincts. The officers carried guns and two-way radios. Some were in uniform. They wore armbands that read “National Ballot Security Task Force.”

They also put up posters that read: “WARNING: This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force. It is a crime to falsify a ballot or to violate election laws.”

The strategy paid off. The Republican candidate, Thomas Kean, won by just 1,797 votes out of more than two million cast. It remains the closest governor’s race in New Jersey history.

Democrats sued under federal civil rights and voting rights laws, seeking $10 million in damages. Rather than go to trial, the RNC settled. It agreed to a court-enforced consent decree that barred it from running similar “ballot security” programs.

That didn’t end the matter.

In several elections, Democrats had to go back to court over Republican antics. In one instance, the RNC was forced to disclose an internal memo describing its program to “eliminate at least 60,000-80,000 folks from the rolls…If it’s a close race…which I’m assuming it is, this could keep the black vote down considerably.”

But even as Republicans found other ways to cheat, the ban on deploying off-duty law enforcement at the polls was largely obeyed. Then, at the end of 2017, the decree expired.

Ahead of the next presidential election, a senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign was caught on tape telling Wisconsin Republicans that “traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places.” With the consent decree gone, he said, it was time to “start playing offense a little bit.”

Most importantly, he promised that Republicans would now run “a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

Rogers is a former FBI agent and a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He knows exactly what it means for officers to flash their badges.

As a Republican officeholder for most of the decree’s lifetime, he can hardly have missed that the RNC spent decades barred from putting police at the polls.

Since his remarks became public, Rogers has, in Trumpian fashion, doubled down. His campaign now says it simply wants “people of integrity, such as teachers, retired law enforcement, and construction workers” to volunteer.

But that is not what Rogers said.

He didn’t ask the RNC to send teachers or construction workers. He asked for police officers.

And he didn’t ask for them to be sent statewide. He asked for them in Detroit.

I have no doubt that ordinary poll watchers have been part of Michigan elections for decades. But off-duty officers flashing badges at voters in Black neighborhoods have not been — at least not if the RNC was involved.

Michigan shouldn’t have to rely on lapsed court orders or Rogers’s restraint.

New Jersey, which lived through the 1981 Ballot Security Task Force, passed a law prohibiting both on-duty and off-duty officers from standing within 100 feet of a polling place. Michigan’s legislature should do the same.

In the meantime, voters need to know their rights. Under Michigan law, poll watchers and challengers may not approach voters or speak to them directly.

Those of us in the pro-democracy movement cannot focus only on the misuse of federal power. We must also pay attention to what Republican candidates are saying and doing. Then we must close any gaps in the laws that would let them follow through.