This is a systems problem, not a human problem. It was inevitable that any weaknesses in the system would eventually be exploited. We should focus on fixing the system so this cannot happen again.
I disagree completely. There are a lot of tweaks which need to be made to the various mechanisms of American government, but ultimately there's no system you can design which can fix the problem of "approximately half the country is in a personality cult to one guy who demands absolute power, and his supporters in government refuse to enforce the law against him". Or at least no system which is remotely recognizable as democratic. How could that possibly work?
It's user error, and trying to fix it without changing the minds and wants of those users just makes them angrier that "the Elites are undermining the will of the People" or whatever.
Can anyone downvoting this comment explain why? It seems like an objective fact at this point that this administration is lawless. Trump himself has stated that anything he does as president is by definition legal and that the only bounds on what he can do are "[his] own morality"
Voters should exercise their second amendment constitutionally protected right when they arrive to vote.
(As of early 2026, 29 states allow permitless (constitutional) concealed carry of firearms in most public spaces, while 21 states still generally require a permit. Major permitless carry states include Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and Arizona. While 47 states allow some form of open carry, California, Illinois, and New York prohibit it)
Is there any state where it isn't illegal to carry at polling locations? I live in probably the most pro 2A state in the USA and it's illegal even here.
If you live in the most pro-2A state, which is Texas, then you need not worry about this because not only will Texas vote Republican in a wildly lopsided fashion as usual, and not only will the state of Texas gleefully cooperate with Trump election interference, it is also the one place where ICE goons won't stalk the streets carrying arms and wearing skull masks because by statute and by jurisprudence Texas has already firmly established that it's reasonable to shoot such a person dead, due to doubt about their identity as genuine peace officers.
And, to be perfectly clear, it is reasonable to shoot that person on sight. But so far only Texas has codified it.
> A stand-your-ground law, sometimes called a "line in the sand" or "no duty to retreat" law, provides that people may use deadly force when they reasonably believe it to be necessary to defend against certain violent crimes (right of self-defense). Under such a law, people have no duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense, so long as they are in a place where they are lawfully present. The exact details vary by jurisdiction.
Only within X feet of a polling place typically. Check your local laws for compliance. Print them out, have them on your person. I am advocating for protecting yourself against unlawful federal force, including lethal force, while remaining within the letter of the law while exercising your right to vote. Definitely don't break the law as it relates to crossing a threshold (distance, whatever) with a firearm at a polling location, if that is the law in your jurisdiction. Certainly a better option than being dead and having ProPublica have to release the names of those who caused harm, imho. Alternatively, you should be talking to your governor already about local police and national guard being stationed to protect voters from federal agent intimidation, if needed. Pick your risk appetite.
You are responsible for protecting you, no one else is or will. Know the law, operate within it to the best of your ability and from a position of good faith. Failing all of that, a jury will work it out.
The President is absolutely immune to the law for any "official actions", and the Supreme Court case which established this was specifically about whether ensuring voting integrity, no matter how farcically pre-textual, is an "official action": they determined it is. The law won't help us here.
Even if the law helps, who would enforce it? The president can violate any law it appears. The DOJ won’t do anything against the president, since it is an executive agency under the president’s direction. If it required SCOTUS, it is just too slow acting to respond to the constant stream of violations. We need a new arm of the government to enforce the law against the executive branch.
Americans needs to decide whether the issues is that the constitution is just badly written or whether the supreme court is trying to intentionally destroy democracy to help their right wing friends. Or whether both are true.
My personal litmus test for whether we've entered any kind of "there's still a little hope for the Republic" territory is whether anyone with real power is talking about eliminating the permanent position of Supreme Court Justice and replacing that with a by-lot panel system from the lower courts.
This isn't a crazy or impossible proposition, it can be done with just a law. We already form some courts in a similar way, so it's also not unprecedented. It even avoids the naked partisanship of a simple court-packing.
As far as I can tell, nobody who matters is talking about it yet. So. Hope is... remote.
Liberia had a nearly identical constitution for much of its existence. You know, the place from where General Butt Naked warlord engaged in cannabilism of the populace and each president for awhile was replaced with the last via having their ear cut off or tortured and then hanged while the next guys people drink a budweiser in front of the camera for the world to see.
It's a road map to where we end up with a similar document but a different culture.
The paper is _the_ reminder of the promises we owe to future selves and generations. Its value lies in the People's strength to enforce it by exercising the obligations and rights it describes.
One thing that surprised me in the Epstein files is just how much Epstein was intertwined in various foreign relations. Like Peter Thiel repeatedly meeting Russian officials and his Kremlin handler (literally) at Epstein’s properties. And various Israeli people conducting business there. Isn’t Thiel collaborating with Russians treasonous? What does it mean when you have this set of people who are all working together - Bannon, Thiel, Musk, Vance, etc - are they all treasonous?
A very high proportion of seats in any given election are, for "natural" or gerrymandering reasons, regarded as "safe seats" for their incumbent or (if the incumbent isn't running) party. These can all be ignored, unless you're just wanting to mess with a few polling places in safe Democratic districts to further a narrative of election chaos. For actually directly changing outcomes, they're irrelevant.
A seat that is likely to flip is probably going to be a relatively close race.
There are a bunch of public and private sources you can use, and databases both parties have already compiled, to find out which polling places are likely to be overwhelmingly visited by one party's voters over the other.
A majority of one in the House, and a tie in the Senate, is all the White House needs to mostly prevent Congress from messing with them much (though larger margins are better).
Combine all these facts and they have more than enough ICE agents to have a huge effect on the outcomes. They only need to show up in a handful of specific places to completely change the course of the next couple years.
They’re recruiting aggressively right now, and ICE received over 200K applications per some statement they put out. So they’ll probably be at 40K+ agents by mid-year. Note that while there are thousands of election places, there are only a small number of states that are deciders for the elections, since others are solidly blue or red. And in those states, there are only a handful of blue cities for Trump/GOP to disrupt. And even within those cities, it’s easy to figure out which areas are likely voting one way or the other. ICE already has far more agents than every local police force in every one of those locations. They would overwhelm everyone if they do this.
I keep hearing this, but it doesn't make sense. This is electionist cope. The elections are decided in a handful of states with narrow margins. The ICE guys will be hanging around in urban neighborhoods with lots of minorities. Such as parts of Milwaukee and Detroit.
Which means that this discussion should take place _right here_. That is also a role for moderation to play. It used to be worse though, the fascism is now too much in the face to push it aside, so some of the critical pieces of information are not immediately removed from front page. But HN has a problem with reality and responsibility, I had naively thought the public would be more intellectually honest. Reality will only get more uncomfortable, I think. Authoritarian dynamics will inevitable escalate, crushing dissent or competition, anything goes in this zero sum game. The business part has to think about its political part.
This wouldn't be on-topic for HN even if it wasn't running in "Newsweek" --- even if a sitting senator had said it, mere proposals are explicitly off-topic --- but I always feel like it's useful to call out the fact that "Newsweek" is a grift publication. The Newsweek your parents read went out of business a decade and a half ago, and was purchased by a cult and run as an SEO farm.
Why is a proposal off-topic? Who decides what is on-topic and off-topic? It seems quite relevant to me, since the administration regularly has people putting out statements that either test the waters or try to normalize some idea. And those statements have significant impact on many readers of HN.
Agreed. Bannon has substantial political influence, and they definitely know that. The parent's comments have a history of unnecessarily concern-trolling posts they don't like, instead of flagging them or moving on.
What's happening on the media landscape is an enormous problem, highly manipulated and coordinated on the right-wing side. Flooding the zone is happening, among other things that weaken trust in journalism, weaken/defund/discourage investigative reporting, burying the lede information etc.
However, using the goon squad to illegally intimidate and disenfranchise voters is a problem large enough that calling it a would-be distraction from the Epstein files is doing everyone a disservice.
We have to pay attention to more than one thing. Saying <blank> is just a distraction from <blank-2>, means that you're too distracted by <blank-2> and need to step back and look around at all the other horrors.
This is a predictable play. This had a highish likelihood of happening the moment they announced the massive, rapid funding and personnel expansion. Now that "abolish ICE" (ICE being their critically-important newly-empowered end-run around Posse Comitatus) is trending, they basically have to play every card they've got, or risk seeing their project set back by at least a few years, just as it's gaining steam. It'll take longer to capture enough of the courts and military that they don't need ICE and its bullshit "but immigration enforcement must have special otherwise-unconstitutional powers" smoke-screen of a justification any more.
I also expect:
1) Lawsuits, subpoenas, and indictments against and of elections offices and key officials in Democratic areas of vulnerable Republican districts, timed to mess with their ability to even function. If it suppresses the vote that's a "nice to have" but mostly this is to sow uncertainty about the elections both by generating ginned-up headlines (it doesn't matter if the investigations actually find anything or go anywhere) and by delaying vote counting and causing chaos (e.g. very long lines) on Election Day, which opens up greater space for the GOP to act after the elections.
2) Challenges of the outcomes by the administration and their proxies, and outright calls for Republicans to pull certification tricks akin to the fake-elector crime they attempted in '20. This would be supported by #1, and by ICE-created chaos and vote suppression.
Incidentally, the ICE intervention can take many forms, the most extreme of which (and most effective to the admin) is triggering violence (a lot of people are going to react poorly to being asked "papers, please" by a small squad of armed & armored federal thugs on the way to vote) that actually shuts down polling places in key locations. This both heavily suppresses the vote in areas they've targeted, and serves their "chaos! Democrats are trying to cheat by letting illegals vote! See how much they freak out when we don't let them?" narrative. The lighter version is some cautious shows-of-force and unrealized threats ahead of time, aimed at gentler levels of vote suppression (if you're a citizen but have an accent and aren't white, you might think twice about your odds of getting to the polls without getting locked up for a day or two and losing perhaps five figures you may not have attaining your release, and just stay home, even if ICE ends up not showing or just doing some show-of-force drive-bys that end up all over social media)
I'd love to know what, if anything, state governments are planning to prevent any of this. I've personally not been able to think of a single effective thing they can do about it as far as actually keeping it from happening or recovering quickly from the material harm it does (winning much later in the court of public opinion, for whatever that's worth, is another matter, as is eventually winning in court) but maybe there's something.
(I rate all the above fairly likely, in some form; my outside-but-not-impossible-odds guess is they'll seize some ballot drop boxes or enroute mail-in ballots with nebulous claims of wrongdoing that don't go anywhere but do fuck up specific districts' voting processes, with, as usual, no relief from the courts because by the time anything can be done about it it's a fait accompli and nobody's gonna trust those ballots after the feds have had them, anyway)
The process is so blunt, so blatant, it's surprising that it works. I'm guessing it's the result of years and years of lessening the american people so that they can roll over in the most undignified way.
A lot of people have been concerned that ICE is turning into a personal army for Trump. This year they will expand ICE to over 40,000 agents allegedly. This is enough to overwhelm police departments in every jurisdiction.
There is a real possibility that these agents will continue detainment of people, even if they are US citizens, as they are trying to vote. Perhaps they will use their facial recognition app, Mobile Fortify (built by NEC), to identify people and decide if they’re a likely GOP voter or not. Who knows. Whatever they do, this feels like a serious threat to American democracy.
No, if it was maximizing suppression bang for the buck it would be the Democratic precincts in swing states, not “swing precincts and states”, because electoral votes (except for 5—out of the 9 in Nebraska and Maine—that are determined by Congressional district) are decided by statewide (not precinct level) outcomes, so you get the maximum effect on the outcome by suppressing the vote in Democratic-leaning areas of swing states, not by targeting precincts that are near parity in the same states.
Sure, I was thinking in terms of the presidential; but its pretty similar for midterms, you'd still mostly want to target Democratic and not swing precincts, but those in swing congressional districts rather than swing states; precincts are typically on the several hundred to a few thousand people; congressional districts are several hundred thousand to just over a million people.
the swing is small enough that one doesn't even have to target individuals. delaying some mail from particular zip codes might be enough. suppressing urban voting a little might be enough. a few of these and you're done.
Voter intimidation is against the law.
Well, when the president does it ... that means that it is not illegal
-- Richard Nixon, 1973; US Supreme Court, 2024
Or, as Trump likes to put (quote) it: "He who saves his Country does not violate any law."
This administration is lawless.
This is a systems problem, not a human problem. It was inevitable that any weaknesses in the system would eventually be exploited. We should focus on fixing the system so this cannot happen again.
I disagree completely. There are a lot of tweaks which need to be made to the various mechanisms of American government, but ultimately there's no system you can design which can fix the problem of "approximately half the country is in a personality cult to one guy who demands absolute power, and his supporters in government refuse to enforce the law against him". Or at least no system which is remotely recognizable as democratic. How could that possibly work?
It's user error, and trying to fix it without changing the minds and wants of those users just makes them angrier that "the Elites are undermining the will of the People" or whatever.
Can anyone downvoting this comment explain why? It seems like an objective fact at this point that this administration is lawless. Trump himself has stated that anything he does as president is by definition legal and that the only bounds on what he can do are "[his] own morality"
Voters should exercise their second amendment constitutionally protected right when they arrive to vote.
(As of early 2026, 29 states allow permitless (constitutional) concealed carry of firearms in most public spaces, while 21 states still generally require a permit. Major permitless carry states include Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and Arizona. While 47 states allow some form of open carry, California, Illinois, and New York prohibit it)
Is there any state where it isn't illegal to carry at polling locations? I live in probably the most pro 2A state in the USA and it's illegal even here.
If you live in the most pro-2A state, which is Texas, then you need not worry about this because not only will Texas vote Republican in a wildly lopsided fashion as usual, and not only will the state of Texas gleefully cooperate with Trump election interference, it is also the one place where ICE goons won't stalk the streets carrying arms and wearing skull masks because by statute and by jurisprudence Texas has already firmly established that it's reasonable to shoot such a person dead, due to doubt about their identity as genuine peace officers.
And, to be perfectly clear, it is reasonable to shoot that person on sight. But so far only Texas has codified it.
> A stand-your-ground law, sometimes called a "line in the sand" or "no duty to retreat" law, provides that people may use deadly force when they reasonably believe it to be necessary to defend against certain violent crimes (right of self-defense). Under such a law, people have no duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense, so long as they are in a place where they are lawfully present. The exact details vary by jurisdiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law#United_S... (status by US state)
Notably, Minneapolis, the epicenter of intimidation by ICE, is duty to retreat in public.
So if you show up at the polls and someone threatens you, it appears you have to turn around and run away.
Only within X feet of a polling place typically. Check your local laws for compliance. Print them out, have them on your person. I am advocating for protecting yourself against unlawful federal force, including lethal force, while remaining within the letter of the law while exercising your right to vote. Definitely don't break the law as it relates to crossing a threshold (distance, whatever) with a firearm at a polling location, if that is the law in your jurisdiction. Certainly a better option than being dead and having ProPublica have to release the names of those who caused harm, imho. Alternatively, you should be talking to your governor already about local police and national guard being stationed to protect voters from federal agent intimidation, if needed. Pick your risk appetite.
You are responsible for protecting you, no one else is or will. Know the law, operate within it to the best of your ability and from a position of good faith. Failing all of that, a jury will work it out.
https://www.thetrace.org/2024/10/state-gun-bans-polling-plac...
Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun. (A Talk About Risk and Preparedness) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509164 - November 2022
The President is absolutely immune to the law for any "official actions", and the Supreme Court case which established this was specifically about whether ensuring voting integrity, no matter how farcically pre-textual, is an "official action": they determined it is. The law won't help us here.
Congress won't either. What's left?
Even if the law helps, who would enforce it? The president can violate any law it appears. The DOJ won’t do anything against the president, since it is an executive agency under the president’s direction. If it required SCOTUS, it is just too slow acting to respond to the constant stream of violations. We need a new arm of the government to enforce the law against the executive branch.
Americans needs to decide whether the issues is that the constitution is just badly written or whether the supreme court is trying to intentionally destroy democracy to help their right wing friends. Or whether both are true.
My personal litmus test for whether we've entered any kind of "there's still a little hope for the Republic" territory is whether anyone with real power is talking about eliminating the permanent position of Supreme Court Justice and replacing that with a by-lot panel system from the lower courts.
This isn't a crazy or impossible proposition, it can be done with just a law. We already form some courts in a similar way, so it's also not unprecedented. It even avoids the naked partisanship of a simple court-packing.
As far as I can tell, nobody who matters is talking about it yet. So. Hope is... remote.
Liberia had a nearly identical constitution for much of its existence. You know, the place from where General Butt Naked warlord engaged in cannabilism of the populace and each president for awhile was replaced with the last via having their ear cut off or tortured and then hanged while the next guys people drink a budweiser in front of the camera for the world to see.
It's a road map to where we end up with a similar document but a different culture.
The paper is _the_ reminder of the promises we owe to future selves and generations. Its value lies in the People's strength to enforce it by exercising the obligations and rights it describes.
Bannon is being funded by a foreign agent. His job is to create controversy.
One thing that surprised me in the Epstein files is just how much Epstein was intertwined in various foreign relations. Like Peter Thiel repeatedly meeting Russian officials and his Kremlin handler (literally) at Epstein’s properties. And various Israeli people conducting business there. Isn’t Thiel collaborating with Russians treasonous? What does it mean when you have this set of people who are all working together - Bannon, Thiel, Musk, Vance, etc - are they all treasonous?
How many ICE agents is there? How many elections places are in USA? They would be spread so thinly that it would not even matter.
A very high proportion of seats in any given election are, for "natural" or gerrymandering reasons, regarded as "safe seats" for their incumbent or (if the incumbent isn't running) party. These can all be ignored, unless you're just wanting to mess with a few polling places in safe Democratic districts to further a narrative of election chaos. For actually directly changing outcomes, they're irrelevant.
A seat that is likely to flip is probably going to be a relatively close race.
There are a bunch of public and private sources you can use, and databases both parties have already compiled, to find out which polling places are likely to be overwhelmingly visited by one party's voters over the other.
A majority of one in the House, and a tie in the Senate, is all the White House needs to mostly prevent Congress from messing with them much (though larger margins are better).
Combine all these facts and they have more than enough ICE agents to have a huge effect on the outcomes. They only need to show up in a handful of specific places to completely change the course of the next couple years.
They’re recruiting aggressively right now, and ICE received over 200K applications per some statement they put out. So they’ll probably be at 40K+ agents by mid-year. Note that while there are thousands of election places, there are only a small number of states that are deciders for the elections, since others are solidly blue or red. And in those states, there are only a handful of blue cities for Trump/GOP to disrupt. And even within those cities, it’s easy to figure out which areas are likely voting one way or the other. ICE already has far more agents than every local police force in every one of those locations. They would overwhelm everyone if they do this.
I keep hearing this, but it doesn't make sense. This is electionist cope. The elections are decided in a handful of states with narrow margins. The ICE guys will be hanging around in urban neighborhoods with lots of minorities. Such as parts of Milwaukee and Detroit.
> The ICE guys will be hanging around in urban neighborhoods with lots of minorities. Such as parts of Milwaukee and Detroit.
Which they have been. How did that go in the special election a few days ago?
There was a recent first-past-the-post statewide special election somewhere?
Flagged, because...?
Because fascists.
What’s a better forum? Tired of “crushing democracy isn’t directly related to tech” flagging
Which means that this discussion should take place _right here_. That is also a role for moderation to play. It used to be worse though, the fascism is now too much in the face to push it aside, so some of the critical pieces of information are not immediately removed from front page. But HN has a problem with reality and responsibility, I had naively thought the public would be more intellectually honest. Reality will only get more uncomfortable, I think. Authoritarian dynamics will inevitable escalate, crushing dissent or competition, anything goes in this zero sum game. The business part has to think about its political part.
This wouldn't be on-topic for HN even if it wasn't running in "Newsweek" --- even if a sitting senator had said it, mere proposals are explicitly off-topic --- but I always feel like it's useful to call out the fact that "Newsweek" is a grift publication. The Newsweek your parents read went out of business a decade and a half ago, and was purchased by a cult and run as an SEO farm.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Why is a proposal off-topic? Who decides what is on-topic and off-topic? It seems quite relevant to me, since the administration regularly has people putting out statements that either test the waters or try to normalize some idea. And those statements have significant impact on many readers of HN.
I would change that classification from "mere proposal" to "credible threat".
I'm honestly disappointed to see this flagged. What's the saying, "Even an SEO farm is right twice a day"?
Agreed. Bannon has substantial political influence, and they definitely know that. The parent's comments have a history of unnecessarily concern-trolling posts they don't like, instead of flagging them or moving on.
The Project 2025 crew is so obvious about what they are doing, and the counter-measures seem to be along the lines of, "well, let's see how it goes."
Steve Bannon is all over the Epstein files. He'd probably say anything outlandish to deflect attention away from that.
> https://www.jmail.world/messages/steve-bannon
It's not deflection. They're just doing multiple evil things at the same time.
"Flood the zone"
What's happening on the media landscape is an enormous problem, highly manipulated and coordinated on the right-wing side. Flooding the zone is happening, among other things that weaken trust in journalism, weaken/defund/discourage investigative reporting, burying the lede information etc.
However, using the goon squad to illegally intimidate and disenfranchise voters is a problem large enough that calling it a would-be distraction from the Epstein files is doing everyone a disservice.
We have to pay attention to more than one thing. Saying <blank> is just a distraction from <blank-2>, means that you're too distracted by <blank-2> and need to step back and look around at all the other horrors.
Americans have been in a hot civil war since January 2021 and just refuse to realize it.
Arguably the original civil war never ended. The most important battle lost by the Union forces: Reconstruction.
Just like The War of the Last Alliance. Reconstruction was Isildur keeping the ring for himself.
The boys told me to stop bringing this up. But yes, correct take.
Like a slow motion Troubles
It is exactly that.
This is a predictable play. This had a highish likelihood of happening the moment they announced the massive, rapid funding and personnel expansion. Now that "abolish ICE" (ICE being their critically-important newly-empowered end-run around Posse Comitatus) is trending, they basically have to play every card they've got, or risk seeing their project set back by at least a few years, just as it's gaining steam. It'll take longer to capture enough of the courts and military that they don't need ICE and its bullshit "but immigration enforcement must have special otherwise-unconstitutional powers" smoke-screen of a justification any more.
I also expect:
1) Lawsuits, subpoenas, and indictments against and of elections offices and key officials in Democratic areas of vulnerable Republican districts, timed to mess with their ability to even function. If it suppresses the vote that's a "nice to have" but mostly this is to sow uncertainty about the elections both by generating ginned-up headlines (it doesn't matter if the investigations actually find anything or go anywhere) and by delaying vote counting and causing chaos (e.g. very long lines) on Election Day, which opens up greater space for the GOP to act after the elections.
2) Challenges of the outcomes by the administration and their proxies, and outright calls for Republicans to pull certification tricks akin to the fake-elector crime they attempted in '20. This would be supported by #1, and by ICE-created chaos and vote suppression.
Incidentally, the ICE intervention can take many forms, the most extreme of which (and most effective to the admin) is triggering violence (a lot of people are going to react poorly to being asked "papers, please" by a small squad of armed & armored federal thugs on the way to vote) that actually shuts down polling places in key locations. This both heavily suppresses the vote in areas they've targeted, and serves their "chaos! Democrats are trying to cheat by letting illegals vote! See how much they freak out when we don't let them?" narrative. The lighter version is some cautious shows-of-force and unrealized threats ahead of time, aimed at gentler levels of vote suppression (if you're a citizen but have an accent and aren't white, you might think twice about your odds of getting to the polls without getting locked up for a day or two and losing perhaps five figures you may not have attaining your release, and just stay home, even if ICE ends up not showing or just doing some show-of-force drive-bys that end up all over social media)
I'd love to know what, if anything, state governments are planning to prevent any of this. I've personally not been able to think of a single effective thing they can do about it as far as actually keeping it from happening or recovering quickly from the material harm it does (winning much later in the court of public opinion, for whatever that's worth, is another matter, as is eventually winning in court) but maybe there's something.
(I rate all the above fairly likely, in some form; my outside-but-not-impossible-odds guess is they'll seize some ballot drop boxes or enroute mail-in ballots with nebulous claims of wrongdoing that don't go anywhere but do fuck up specific districts' voting processes, with, as usual, no relief from the courts because by the time anything can be done about it it's a fait accompli and nobody's gonna trust those ballots after the feds have had them, anyway)
Every accusation, an admission
The process is so blunt, so blatant, it's surprising that it works. I'm guessing it's the result of years and years of lessening the american people so that they can roll over in the most undignified way.
A lot of people have been concerned that ICE is turning into a personal army for Trump. This year they will expand ICE to over 40,000 agents allegedly. This is enough to overwhelm police departments in every jurisdiction.
There is a real possibility that these agents will continue detainment of people, even if they are US citizens, as they are trying to vote. Perhaps they will use their facial recognition app, Mobile Fortify (built by NEC), to identify people and decide if they’re a likely GOP voter or not. Who knows. Whatever they do, this feels like a serious threat to American democracy.
On Election Day, they will deploy ICE to traditionally Democratic voting precincts. This is how they will "solve" electoral fraud.
1. Deploy ICE agents wearing milsim gear to key Dem voting locations.
2. Allow the crowd to yell at them.
3. Use the crowd agitation as an opportunity to escalate and go "hands on".
4. Cause a ruckus.
5. Use the ruckus as justification for closing the polling location for the rest of the day.
6. Count the Republican votes, discard the Dem votes.
7. Declare landslide victory.
8. Ignore calls for extended voting or recounts.
It is the swing precincts and states that they will deploy it to.
No, if it was maximizing suppression bang for the buck it would be the Democratic precincts in swing states, not “swing precincts and states”, because electoral votes (except for 5—out of the 9 in Nebraska and Maine—that are determined by Congressional district) are decided by statewide (not precinct level) outcomes, so you get the maximum effect on the outcome by suppressing the vote in Democratic-leaning areas of swing states, not by targeting precincts that are near parity in the same states.
That’s for the presidential elections right? For midterms wouldn’t they target swing districts that determine House seats?
Sure, I was thinking in terms of the presidential; but its pretty similar for midterms, you'd still mostly want to target Democratic and not swing precincts, but those in swing congressional districts rather than swing states; precincts are typically on the several hundred to a few thousand people; congressional districts are several hundred thousand to just over a million people.
the swing is small enough that one doesn't even have to target individuals. delaying some mail from particular zip codes might be enough. suppressing urban voting a little might be enough. a few of these and you're done.