> Does the First Amendment protect intimidating speech?
Not always. The First Amendment does not protect intimidation in the form of “true threats,” “where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence” against another person or group. Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 360 (2003).
Even when speech is not openly threatening, states and localities nonetheless may impose some restrictions on speech in order to protect the integrity of elections and the rights of voters to cast their ballots free from intimidation. In Burson v. Freeman, 504 U.S. 191 (1992), the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that banned campaigning within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place.
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
> Long before the Court affirmed the right to vote as constitutionally protected, Congress had passed a series of laws which extended civil rights protections, including suffrage protections, to recently emancipated slaves following the civil war. These laws, deemed the “Enforcement Acts,” are to some extent still in place today, and those statutes continue to be the primary method by which the federal government enforces the civil rights of individual citizens. 18 U.S.C. §§241 and 242 provide broad jurisdiction to prosecute corruption of rights. The statutes cover the intentional deprivation of any right protected under the Constitution or federal law. §241 makes it unlawful for two or more persons “to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”38 §242 makes it unlawful for anyone “acting under color of law” to deprive a person of such a right.
> The Supreme Court acknowledged the broad scope of §241 when it opined that “[t]he language of §241 is plain and unlimited. [It] embraces all of the rights and privileges secured to citizens by all of the Constitution and all of the laws of the United States....We think [its] history leaves no doubt that, if we are to give §241 the scope its origins dictate, we must accord it a sweep as broad as its language.”51 The broad scope of the law allows for the sweeping protection of federally recognized rights. At the same time, it constructs some barriers for applying the law when new types of violations must be articulated. To that end, the statute has been the target of a vast number of vagueness challenges in federal courts – although to little avail.