The day after my last post, about how the current attempts to sabotage the midterm elections are likely to succeed regardless of legality, a new story broke about how the post office is continuing to develop a voter suppression technique despite being forbidden by the courts.
Long story short, (and aside from the fact that it is
illegal for the post office to have any role in voting systems, other than just
delivering the mail, AND the likely illegality of states having to filter their
voter rolls through a federal “approved” list), the plan is for the USPS to
take a sample of around 400 outgoing ballots from a batch of 10,000, bump them
up against the federal list, and if even a single one is deemed ineligible, the
entire group of 10,000 will be returned to the state.
You can see how that would inevitably entail tens of
thousands of ballots being sent back and forth, eating up all the available
mailing time before the election.
This is how you know it isn’t about preventing ineligible
votes. This system is designed to
stop the whole process in its tracks; otherwise they’d just pull the ineligible
votes and send the rest on.
A whistleblower provided an account of the work
continuing on this voter-prevention system, despite the court having already
instructed the Post Office to cease all such activities, so you can see how
seriously the Administration takes court orders. “Just carry on, and by the time it all shakes out, it will be too late.”
This is also a scenario that defeats the use of drop
boxes. You can’t leave your ballot in a drop box if you never receive it in the
first place. I think the states should seriously look into either emailing
ballots or making them available online. It shouldn’t be hard to limit downloads
or emails to those on their list of registered voters. Of course, the Republicans
will scream bloody murder about a new avenue of alleged “voter fraud,” but they
do that about any practice that circumvents their voter suppression tactics. That’s
how mail-in voting became an issue in the first place.
Another story that broke last week was
how a Tarrant County election commission in Texas decided to eliminate 92
voting locations. This action immediately followed a “town hall meeting”
wherein the overwhelming majority of attendees supported NOT removing voting
locations. Tarrant County abuts Dallas and contains Fort Worth, and is one of
the “Bluer” areas in Texas, and key to the Democrats picking up a Senate seat. Making
it more inconvenient for your opponent to vote is a cornerstone of Republican
voter suppression, whether it’s actions like these, or removing voting machines
from key precincts, removing or decreasing early in-person voting days, or
draconian water prohibitions when in line to vote.
They know that white-collar (upper class) can spend all
day in line and their employers will accommodate, while blue-collar (middle/lower
class) workers’ employers are much less lenient. Someone has to be there to
make the donuts. Not to mention the loss of hourly wages while standing in
line.
And regarding another voter suppression angle I covered last week, there was an article in the paper regarding using the military to appear at polling places.
The AP article quotes Gen Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying that there are no plans to send troops to the polls.
That’s fine, except that it has no bearing on whether ICE
is sent. ICE is not part of the traditional military and is not under their
chain of command. The president, via the Department of Homeland Security, can
send ICE anywhere he wants. I guarantee they will be out and about on Election
Day, on the prowl for brown voters they can pick up or scare off. I suspect
this article is just one more way that mainstream media is trying to keep a lid
on things, to keep people happy and complacent.
We can no longer afford to be complacent about anything. Big changes are afoot, and without our active resistance, the move to a fascist authoritarian regime is imminent.
One more quick observation. Do you know how TFG has been filling up Truth Social with fantastical AI depictions of himself in godly/heroic scenarios? There was a telling passage in the new book, "Regime Change" (Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan) that might explain it. They report that he was enthralled by AI technology, particularly about how you can just tell ChatGPT something and it will spit out what you want. He had a lot of questions about it and how it worked. (This is unusual, since he's not normally curious about anything.) So I wouldn't be surprised that rather than merely forwarding the fawning work of others, he was creating these things himself, or at least telling Natalie what he wanted.
