Threat of stationing immigration agents around voting locations has become a concern as it can be a deterrent to legal residents of color who are concerned they may be harassed by federal agents
The White House refused to rule out following through on the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents being sent out to “surround the polls” when voters cast ballots in this November’s midterm elections as a way of depressing Democratic turnout and boosting chances of Republican victories in the House of Representatives and Senate.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday said she could offer “no guarantee” that ICE personnel would not be stationed at polling sites when Americans are in the process of choosing whether to extend the Republican stranglehold on power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
She had been asked about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s recent call for Trump to deploy ICE around election sites on his War Room podcast on Tuesday, just days after Trump himself called for a Republican “takeover” of vote-counting in Democratic-led states and municipalities.
Yes, but also I’m not convinced they haven’t done so by voter suppression. I’ve seen a lot fewer articles on that and that may not be part of voter fraud invests. There continue to be way too many attempts to suppress votes. How do you even count how many votes didn’t happen?
And it only needs to happen in swing states. You combine that with gerrymandering and it doesn’t have to prevent many voters to make a difference
Exactly. Look back at the Jim Crow era. That’s the goal. Jim Crow didn’t work by white people stealing the vote. It worked by writing laws that openly made it so black people couldn’t vote. Ultimately it’s a lot more sustainable to simply write laws that serve your side than it is to try to hold onto power by repeated election fraud. With the latter, you ultimately have to worry about the military just refusing to acknowledge clearly fraudulent elections. But if the elections are crooked but entirely within the law? Much more difficult for the military to refuse to acknowledge those.
I strongly feel this time around it’s going to be a bigger spectacle, a bigger event all around because the tone has shifted. Watch nightly network news for an example. If you can choke through the liberal slop, they are featuring stories now about ICE acting like terrorists, about the administration lying, about people driving masked agents out of their town, they are painting it like an “underdogs versus the feds” narrative. (Not because the networks are suddenly finding human consciousness, but because this storyline sells.)
Midterms may go either way, but we’ve had too much success either way to discount the power of individual states in changing their representation, and with that, their votes and funding. That’s a huge deal. We just need to break the stranglehold a little and the system could stalemate for the next couple years and that’s enough time for people who aren’t Vance or Harris to start capturing media attention.