Federal judges in two states issued rulings Friday as allegations swirled about potential issues at the polls -- saying registration rolls were "likely" illegally purged in North Carolina and barring the Trump and Clinton campaigns from intimidating voters in Ohio.
In the Ohio case, a federal judge imposed a temporary restraining order on the Trump campaign, political operative and sometimes Trump adviser Roger Stone, and a group called Stop the Steal, Inc. which is associated with Stone, from “conspiring to intimidate, threaten, harass, or coerce voters on Election Day.”
The order also extends to the Clinton campaign, even though there was no allegation of wrongdoing against them in the suit, brought by the Ohio Democratic Party.
They are prohibited from hindering voters "from reaching or leaving the polling place," engaging in any unauthorized "poll watching," or gathering or loitering near polling places unless they plan to vote. Trump has repeatedly called for his supporters to watch the polls for voter fraud and said the election would be "rigged."
Separately, a North Carolina judge ruled that the purging of voters names off registration rolls in the state "likely" violated the National Voter Registration Act and issued a preliminary injunction that ordered all steps to be taken to allow those individuals to vote. A suit alleging improprieties was brought by the NAACP.
Arguments over allegations that the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee were coordinating voter intimidation efforts were also scheduled to be held in New Jersey today and Pennsylvania on Monday, according to The Associated Press. Similar cases were already heard in Nevada and Arizona Thursday and a voter intimation suit was filed in Michigan Friday.
The RNC and its members are prohibited from certain poll-monitoring activities because of a legal settlement from the 1980s over allegations they intimidated minority voters.
The RNC claims it has no agreements with the Trump campaign regarding “voter fraud, ballot security, ballot integrity, poll watching or poll monitoring.”
But responsible poll monitoring can help combat voter fraud, Michael Thielen, executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association, said.
"Every fraudulent vote overrides a legitimate, real vote and disenfranchises an honest, eligible voter,” Thielen told ABC News.
He pointed to allegations in Florida, including one where an election worker reportedly filled in ballot choices that were left blank and another alleged instance where people who requested absentee ballots found that their votes had been cast by an impostor.
In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Bruce Breemer said today that his office and the Pennsylvania State Police "are investigating a pattern of voter registration irregularities across the Commonwealth" but said "it is premature to reach any conclusion. At this stage of the investigation there is no evidence of voter fraud."
The issue of voter intimidation efforts is one of the most pressing versions of disenfranchisement in this year's race, said Myrna Perez, the deputy director of New York University's Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program.
Perez said their watchdog organization has seen examples of "both the lawful disenfranchisement and the unlawful disenfranchisement" of voters throughout the past year or two.
She included restrictive voter ID laws and the Supreme Court's 2013 changes to the Voting Rights Act as examples of "lawful" disenfranchisement, but those are not the focus of the last-minute court actions under way now.
"I think in this instance, for the first half of the year, people were concerned about the formal state policies and practices and, right now, folks are concerned about what may be happening on Election Day,” she said.
“What happens when individuals get involved in monitoring and policing our polls, and what unofficial actors are going to be doing.”
Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, said they have heard a variety of complaints about different kinds of voter intimidation during early voting, and not necessarily in the forms that the courts are worried about.
She gave one alleged example of a boss in California pressuring a subordinate to vote a certain way, and a security person at a polling place in Ohio who allegedly said the parking lot was full, prompting many voters to leave.
"We have seen an increase in the number of complaints regarding alleged voter intimidation,” Clarke told ABC News. “Many of these complaints come from voters in Texas and Florida. We are spending more time on the phone with voters working to resolve those complaints.”
Today, the Michigan Democratic Party filed a lawsuit alleging that the Trump campaign along with the Michigan Republican Party, are conspiring to intimidate minorities from voting.
The plaintiffs in that case are asking a federal judge in Michigan to stop Republican operatives from tactics that plaintiffs say are unlawfully aimed at suppressing Democratic votes across the state, especially in urban areas where large shares of African Americans are likely to vote for Hillary Clinton.
In the lawsuit, Democrats accuse Trump of using the potential for voter fraud as a pretext for encouraging supporters to show up at polling places ostensibly to stop people from casting multiple ballots.
The plaintiffs alleged that Trump's heated, racially-tinged rhetoric has led to a kind of domino effect, accelerated by associate Roger Stone, a named defendant, as well as Republican party officials in Michigan who have encouraged "roving poll watchers in places like Detroit."
The lawsuit cites a Trump supporter quoted in a press report saying his election-day plans includes racially profiling voters at polling places to "make them a little bit nervous."
“Trump’s calls for his supporters to travel en masse outside their counties of residence and engage in vigilante voter intimidation bear no possible relationship to legitimate efforts to protect against voter fraud,” the complaint states. “In fact, Trump has directed his supporters to engage in activity forbidden by Michigan state election law.”
There was no immediate response from the Trump campaign.
Voter intimidation is not the only way that activists are worried about how groups could stop some people from getting to vote on Tuesday.
Those aren't the only stories they've heard.
During a campaign rally in Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, President Obama decried the recent claims that voters’ names were allegedly being systematically removed from voter registration rolls in the state.
"The list of voters Republicans tried to purge were two-thirds black and Democratic,” he charged. “That doesn't happen by accident. It's happening in counties across this state.”
"There was a time when systematically denying black folks to vote was considered normal as well. ... It was not that long ago that folks had to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or bubbles on a bar of soap or recite the Constitution in Chinese in order to vote. It wasn't that long ago when folks were beaten trying to register voters in Mississippi," he added.
Voter roll purges have come up in other states in the past few months and during the primaries, as state and county boards of election try to update their rolls to clear them of anyone who has died or moved out of state.
On Oct. 31, North Carolina NAACP filed an emergency application for a temporary restraining order to stop the state and county boards of election "from cancelling the voter registrations of thousands of North Carolina voters who have been targeted in coordinated, en masse challenge proceedings brought in the final weeks and months before Election Day."
Penda Hair, the lead attorney working on the North Carolina NAACP’s case, said that they were "dismayed" about the findings that hundreds of voters were reportedly removed, but they’re actively working to ensure that these actions don’t stop voters from turning out.
The order was granted this afternoon.
“The North Carolina NAACP is communicating to voters that we have their back,” he said, “and they should not in any way feel intimidated but we do know there are efforts.”
ABC News' Julia Jacobo and John Kruzel contributed to this report.
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