Former President Trump was an expert at sowing the doubt that’s now made it into proposals of at least 40 measures aimed at expanding the power of poll watchers — largely seen as an attempt to give legislative weight to former president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election.
Or push back from voters telling someone to fuck off.
There are many ways to say “intimidation”.
That would be a quote from me.
Maybe some enterprising person in the D party could sell these? They’re be practical and make the party some money.
OT. A man who participated in the insurrection is now auditing votes in Arizona. Evidently Rachael has been raking him over the coals this week.
Old man who yells at crowds goes to his grave crying he was robbed. Sad. Soon I hope.
In the next primary or other minor election, send some democrats armed with lawyers into a bunch of red precincts to do all the new laws allow. I think you might see some repeal bills right quick.
Poll watchers get more power to harass and intimidate voters, at the same time that the Supreme Court is taking a case that may allow everyone in the nation to carry a concealed weapon. Sure, coincidental, but just how does it go down when some white supremacist shows up at a majority minority precinct and starts threatening voters with all kinds of bad things if they vote? It won’t be about if they vote illegally, because said white supremacist will assume their vote is illegal by default, it will just be to get them not to vote through intimidation. And, when some minority dude tells the WS to fuck off, does he whip out his gun and fire a few rounds because he “felt threatened”?
All of this is heading to a very, very bad place…if we don’t have assaults against voters in the next election it’s going to be a minor miracle.
Actually, the more pole watchers there are, the less likely either side will try to cheat.
PS: As this will be my last comment, because of the new policy, I want to say what a good job TPM does at being generally fair. Only occasionally do the reporters put too much of their opinions into their reporting. Bye!
So…expanding “poll watchers”, but kicking out audit watchers.
Are there any laws about falsifying audits of elections in Arizona? Asking for some conspirators.
That’s a rather absurd take, particularly given recent history. What they are doing is allowing for increased harassment, increased questioning of valid voters, increased slowdowns and bottlenecks, etc. This has nothing at all to do with “cheating” and everything to do with attempts to block voters and discard legal votes.
There you go. That is the attitude we need to see promoted out there. They have not taken the vote away, so push back harder, stand in line longer and tell them to piss off.
Go ahead poll watchers. Watch me vote. I dare you to try and stop me when I vote in the next election.
“The devil is in the details” for all of this - especially because the motivations for the expansion of “observers” is truly shakey & flimsy. By all accounts, the amount of actual provable genuine “voting fraud” is so remarkably low that statistically it borders on non-existant …the arguments for the ability to aggressively & combatively & adversarially challenge voters in a “profiling” manner are racist through and through. Many of the actions that are being taken to “enhance” the “challenge” function are disingenuous efforts to expand intimidation.
And it gets worse than that, because as soon as anything serious happens the polling place becomes a crime scene. No one in or out until everything has been thoroughly investigated. Which might take a few days.
If the Dems don’t like the poll watchers, they should send some too. I personally don’t trust either paty.
“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully”
Only for the precinct at which the person is registered. We don’t need strangers around our polling places.
I don’t care for the “no evidence of systemic or widespread voter fraud” phrasing. We’re talking about a dozen or so hotheads in every state, who voted twice for Trump. So by all means, bust those dozen hotheads but don’t make several million other voters jump through extra hoops on account of the dirty dozen.
This is exactly what I think when I read all this b.s. that R’s are trying to pull off. Just flip it on them, these laws go both ways.