No. of Recommendations: 3
Every time you say this kind of thing you carry water for those who argue that what we are currently experiencing is politics as usual. You are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy.
One can simultaneous observe that we are not experiencing politics as usual and that we are not at the point where someone could successfully start pulling large numbers of registered voters out of line in public and preventing them from voting and not have that invalidate the election.
It isn't a binary. It isn't "everything is completely normal" and "everything is already a totalitarian dictatorship where elections are a sham because there are no independent power centers and no independent judiciary." And because it isn't a binary, someone making an argument that a totalitarian scenario is legitimately on the table can't support that argument merely by rhetorically noting that things aren't completely normal. And because it isn't a binary, someone pointing out that a totalitarian scenario is unlikely isn't saying that things are completely normal.
Most of the swing elections in the House are in blue or purple states. They are (by definition) in purple areas even of red states. Spinning up a large enough ICE presence in major cities is visible - it requires coordination and planning in advance - which means that there are plenty of opportunities not just for private parties, but also state and county governments, to go into federal court and ask for an injunction to prevent them from doing the sorts of things that would interfere with a citizen's right to vote on election day. To say nothing of the fact that most of the swing districts are in jurisdictions that have both early voting and mail-in absentee ballots - which ups the degree of difficulty on trying to change the outcome just on a single Election Day presence.
There will undoubtedly be things that the Administration does that will affect voter behavior - it happens every election. There will undoubtedly be elections that are decided by a very small number of votes - it happens every election. And there will undoubtedly be people who claim that the former changed the outcome of the latter - it happens every election. Because this Administration is what it is, I have no doubt that they will do things that are unprecedented - but I also think it is unlikely that they will go so far over the line as the type of scenario that Steve (and others) sometimes imagine, because that just ends up making a very GOP-winnable election into a possible judicial problem.
Sarcasm escapes you.
Sarcasm doesn't scan on internet message boards, which is why folks rarely use it without a <sarcasm> tag or emoji. It's not an effective way of communicating. Which is why I asked if you were being sarcastic - not because I was unaware of the possibility, but because it's not a medium in which sarcasm actually comes through.
