Elizabeth McKenna is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and faculty director of the Civic Power Lab.

In early June, more than 100 federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI searched the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a civic organization that has registered voters and organized working-class people in Ohio since 2007. Across the state, agents questioned staff members and volunteers about voter registration and, in some cases, seized their phones and laptops. The Brennan Center for Justice called the raid “an egregious abuse of law enforcement for political ends” that “fits a pattern of federal inquiries targeting voting infrastructure ahead of the midterm elections.”

The Justice Department says the investigation concerns “fraud” and that anything more is speculation. So we do not yet know exactly what the government is accusing OOC of.

But we do know that it sent a force of the size you might assemble for a cartel takedown against people whose work is registering voters, organizing parents to fix Ohio’s childcare and public education systems, and winning Medicaid coverage for new mothers. Prentiss Haney, a board member of the OOC, told me that he was “getting tons of messages and calls … because there were so many agents, trailing people in their cars, following the kids of canvassers and staffers to school drop-off, trying to intimidate them.”

It may just be that the Trump administration is going after the OCC because it is effective. And that effectiveness — as much as the shocking quality of the crackdown — is worth paying attention to.