I already have a job abroad. I am scared for my family and friends who are in the U.S. and can’t leave.
I am very worried about what will happen starting November 4th. The U.S. is already on very shaky ground and I think it will get a lot worse. I hope it gets better so that my parents can go about their lives like normal. The handling of the pandemic and the polarization has made the U.S. a rather scary place to visit.
It sounds like you’re saying, “Everybody does it,” but no, not everybody does it.
Let me put it another way. I maintain that voter-suppression tactics (closing polling places in minority areas, barring access to transportation to polling places, voter ID laws, etc.) are unethical, and that politicians who engage in these tactics are inherently worse than those who do not - because of these very actions, not just randomly tangential to them.
And it then follows that a politician who engages in even more overt suppression, or tampering with results, or whatever other strategies they might use to steal the election, would ipso facto be even worse.
Evidently you do not agree with me on this; so be it. But “I don’t care how awful the people in charge are, as long as my 401k goes up” is a very cynical way of looking at things. I’m no Pollyanna, but I prefer our leaders to be decent people.
There have to be emergency powers embedded in the US Constitution that would be exercised by the Judiciary in such a circumstance (where the Executive has gone totally batty). I believe such an intervention would be swift and dramatic and very public, so as to restore the faith of the citizens in the nation’s political and judicial systems. So I would just sit back and watch, popcorn in hand. No need for rioting. Stuff happens.
Back in India, there used to be badlands where elections would be regularly stolen through brute force - thugs would take over polling centers and basically stuff the ballot papers. The district administration wouldn’t sweat it - they would cancel the elections, ask the Army to provide security, and reschedule polling. People would turn up and vote again, and behold, all is well again. But it has never happened at a national scale - India is too huge for that.
What surprises me though is the US doing relatively little in the face of very public campaigns by Russia/China to influence elections. I expected the US would go ballistic, but we didn’t.