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.
Democratic leadership is sleepwalking us into a permanent state of authoritarian rule.
That’s not fair. They are still working super hard to disarm the people in blue states.
I think it’s open jealousy about how you can get away with practically anything from undermining constitutional amendments to profit personally - all without seemingly being held accountable.
Like not being held accountable for supporting a genocide because of First Past The Post voting forces people to vote for democrats?
The very act of floating this idea is election fraud. Even if they don’t do it, threatening to do it could discourage voters.
We can offer no guarantee that democrat voters won’t be harmed, detained or even murdered while voting.
Republican voters are probably gonna get harassed, arrested, or killed too if they happen to not be white. Then there will be outcry from Republicans who were perfectly fine with it happening to democrats
When Obama ran, local organizations rented vans and escorted people to and from polls.
We can do it again if needed.
Honestly, idk why it stopped. That shit enables better voter turnout…
Those vans would make nice targets for ICE.
Well even a regular car can hold 3 to 4 guests.
So even if people drive around all day with their one car, one person can potentially get 30 people to the polls.
Ding ding ding!
Republicans have stolen every presidential election they’ve won since 2000. There haven’t been consequences yet, and the future won’t be any different unless we stand up.
They tried damn hard to steal the ones they lost as well, and know that because of the last year they may not get voted for, for another couple decades. They know they can’t win, so they are abandoning democracy.
Despite the rampant doomerism in Lemmy and other spaces, it’s still very hard to subvert the entire US electoral process, even if they put a lot of money and effort behind it, it’s not like other countries that have been overthrown or had their voting rigged, the administration would need to do whatever they’re going to do 50 times, across a vast landscape of different procedures and policies around voting and security.
For example, if it was that easy to rig US elections we wouldn’t have seen giant bogeymen like Mamdani and Katie Wilson and other socialists/progressives take so many local leadership seats recently.
Yes, they are going to try to use ICE like their own private mercenary army to intimate voters in blue states, in areas with large populations of immigrants and people of color, that should be expected. And that’s fine, that’s where we meet them.
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.
you ultimately have to worry about the military just refusing to acknowledge clearly fraudulent elections
You put too much faith in the military not being full of fascist sycophants and those going along to get along.
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.
How the fuck did we get to a point where it’s normal for the government to say these things?
Conservatives stopped respecting our Constitution and our nation as a whole.
But they’re pretty good at showing up to vote, unlike many other Americans. That, combined with our electoral system being a joke and designed to allow a minority to have control, and you’ve got our current situation.
Capitalism
Obviously.
This is obviously where it was going.
From day one, from the first lie, to the arming of his own private army, this has been the goal. Obviously.
Americans will be surprised, of course. As always.
“Back when it was step 3, all the alarmists were warning me about how bad step 10 will be. Now that we’re at step 7, the logical thing to do is continue to accuse people of being alarmist.”
- 9 out of 10 Americans (real Americans)
Americans will be surprised, of course. As always.
No one’s accused Americans of being smart.
Can’t guarantee I won’t communicate with my community to show up to the polling stations with a large group of armed citizens to ensure we can vote safely without the interference of terrorists.
Doesn’t stop them from ratfucking the votes after they’re submitted, but hey, gotta do what we can.
I hear ya, but consider that will make a VERY tense situation that will likely deter voters from engaging.
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It goes beyond this. Voter intimidation is classified federally as an “active threat”. This is basically a hostile crime that can be dealt with via lethal force. The constitution is built to deal with this. Camping outside poll locations and blocking entry is a crime, and it can be deal with as a crime.
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I can definitely see ICE agents prowling around the voting places looking over people’s shoulders at who they voted for.
“I see you’re voting for AOC. Time to die, friend.”
AOC somersaults out of the shadows and karate chops the agent in the throat so hard his head comes clean off
Shia Labeouf
Normal Tuesday night
(Shia Labeouf)
This is getting me hot. Tell me more.
Oh no what happens if ICE agents around polling locations are shot dead.
Everyone else at the polling place leaves and probably doesn’t come back.
Polling location(maybe others) are now closed for public safety from the radical left Democrats.
Will not happen.
Gear up, the hopefools will learn too late.
Well I guess we’re going to be exercising our second amendment rights because that’s tyranny.
This is what Hitler’s SA did, so that’s to be totally expected.
It’s sad how accurate this is…
You know Jan 6 rioters with guns and pipe bombs who attacked officers got pardon.
And employment.
Let everyone you know that mail-in ballots are still an option… but educate them that they must bring the ballot to the post office IN PERSON, and ask the postal staff to post-mark it IN FRONT OF THEM. I have read (please correct me if I’m wrong!) that works around the recent regulation change that allows dropped-off post to be stamped when it’s delivered, instead of when it’s first dropped off, which is a rat-fucking tactic to increase the likelihood of ballots being marked late, knowing they’ll probably take many days from drop-off to delivery.
That’s effectively what’s happening.
The USPS,
under DeJoy (who has long been trying to undermine the USPS from within),has posted this site, which attempts to debunk (i.e., gaslight) over what the change is. They claim the same process applies and only is being clarified, but that’s false since now postmarks will use the process rather than the sending date and that’s a major change. This is key:While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location. [emphasis added]
This is entirely to help support GOP legal challenges that will claim that laws which allow election-day postmarked mail-in ballots to be counted can be struck down, because they will encompass votes that took place after election day, and therefore selectively invalidate mail-in ballots. It’s essentially poisoning the reliability of postmarks to allow for ballot suppression.
Here’s a PBS story about it as well. It also notes that the staffing crunches at the USPS and closing processing facilities will exacerbate the issue since “processing” times will increase, especially for high-volume days like election day.
Edit: David Steiner, not DeJoy, is the current postmaster general.
Bloody hell, why aren’t the Democrats doing everything they can to kick DeJoy out?? What a travesty.
Well, I double-checked and nevermind, DeJoy was out in July of 2025. The new guy is David Steiner, who I suppose the dates make responsible for this.
in california at least you can still bring your absentee ballot to your polling location to drop off. mine is open a week ahead of time, they got someone sitting there with a ballot box.
I live in WA and just drop them off at the county provided ballot boxes, no post office required. There are more of the drop boxes than post offices too.
Yes however I can attest that some states make it easier than others to do mail-in. For example: WA, automatic mail-in, no questions asked. NC, you need to request it, then have your voting observed and certified by either two witnesses or a notary. Every step of the way highly encourages using your driver’s license number or including a copy, otherwise you have to complete more paperwork. THEN you have to take it to the post office to get marked etc. You also go on a list of absentee voters after it is tallied — a nice little target. I used to do it out of spite until it was just too inconvenient compared to early voting.
