Election officials are facing threatening behavior, crushing work hours and low pay, according to a new report that examined the work atmosphere around election administration amid President Trump’s 2020 fear-mongering.
Only one in three? Republicans have work to do.
“Several” election officials shared stories with the Brennan Center about “partisan actors — including elected officials, party leaders, and partisan activists — attempted to interfere with the conduct of the election or to pressure them to favor candidates of their own party, both publicly and privately.”
And of these “several”, how many have been reported so they can be investigated?
Beat me to it.
I think this was the point.
We have an unfortunate tradition of treating our essential workers like pond scum, that the pandemic has brought home to these folk like never before. And employers wonder where their employees are. They should get a clue.
In this case, I hope the DoJ will pull out all the stops in protecting election workers. They are essential to a healthy, vibrant democracy.
We have our work cut out for us. We all suffer with no Democracy, including the Republicans.
Huh? Do they think that the Predators behind the rank and file have the latter in their hearts?
If you can’t win or even come up with a viable platform, there’s always harassment and violence.
Here’s the bigger question:
What happens to elections if no one is there to run them? Is this just another gambit to disallow voting in areas where they can threaten enough people to shut down additional polling places for lack of personnel?
The GQP is working on that plan…
What I’ve noticed, and I’m sure you have too, is that the social media post of too many elected officials, including Dems, is full of hyperbole, misinformation and Trump-esque bloviating. Its disconcerting to see Dems that I generally agree with and like see them fall into the trap and Trump-esque language (obvs none are at his level of shittiness…).
Plant the responsibility where it belongs: The Republican intransigence and lies over many years culminating in the repeated lies, criminality and incitement of treason and sedition by Donald J. Trump, his supporters and enablers. A fish rots from the head down!
Full disclosure - I didn’t read anything past the headline.
Why bother? Their prevarications about their prevarication are formulaic.
There’s absolutely nothing to learn, not even about how they lie.
This is a serious and direct threat to the American democratic republic.
The thing with these election officials is that some of them have other jobs, or jobs that allow them to take the time to work on elections. Or they’re older and are done with working for the most part.
And I’m not going to say that this info isn’t valuable, but it would have been nice to know how many hours they put in in normal times,
And again there was a global pandemic going on without a vaccine. Am I missing something about how Republicans from pretty much all states are ignoring that the pandemic caused all of us, employers, employees, customers, businesses, and damn it governments of all levels and sizes to make adjustments to try and keep people from getting sick, to keep people from getting so sick that they needed to go to hospitals?
It was only Saturday that I went to the grocery store without a mask. It felt strange, and next time I may just carry with me, and decide whether to wear it when I see how many people are in the store.
and actions social media platforms can take to combat disinformation
And as long as all this no-disinformation whatnot causes Zero disruption to their biz model of catering and weaponizing lies to idiots for profit, these companies should be all for it.
This is utterly disgraceful. It’s just another effort by the GQP to destroy our Constitutional system of government. Maddening, but I don’t know what to do about it, other than elect better Democrats.
This is a point of concern - but the findings of a survey of 43 election officials does not seem to be sufficiently comprehensive research to make the sweeping statement that 1 in 3 feel unsafe and apply it to the entire country
there are vast - enormous - numbers of precincts that are decidedly blue - or decidedly red - and the atmosphere is fundamentally not contentious
However - it is that battle ground between the factions where things are getting crazy - in the entire universe of “election officials” it would seem to be a stretch that truly 1/3 throughout the nation are terrified … but in the regions where things may be closely contested it may be a huge huge problem.
What was so repulsive about the hideous behavior during the 2020 election was the massively militant / ignorant behavior - shouting at volunteers - making baseless accusations - whether there are Democrats, Republicans or Independents - in my experience - these election officials & poll workers seek to be impartial - like someone who volunteers to umpire a baseball game or a soccer match - they seek to correctly call balls & strikes / in-bounds & out of bounds … and the ones with basic integrity strive or objectivity - what was repulsive was the deranged rantings of people who were baselessly attacking honest civic minded volunteers who were doing their best to be entirely impartial.
However the crazies were ranting like this was some sort of sporting event and that the election workers should be skewing the results to satisfy the angry crowd.
Let’s have a Federal bill to provide handguns to election officials. Surely that would get bipartisan support?