This has been puzzling me.
I often see news stories about voter intimidation - folks standing near ballot boxes with firearms, especially.
What I wonder is, how are they selecting who to harass? Votes are not public, are they just guessing? Why are people allowing themselves to feel bullied when only they, the voter, presumably knows which way they are leaning?
mmm
Black people.
Welcome to white privilege.
When you see an armed white guy standing at a ballot box or a polling place, you think, “huh, I wonder how anybody can read his mind. He could be glowering at anybody.”
Some people don’t need to guess. And because that history is there, because that just-barely-subtext is there, they don’t have to ‘actively’ harass anybody. They just need to be there. The weight of history does the heavy lifting for them.
Beyond that, anybody with any kind of liberal identification on their vehicle is going to think twice about voting.
If a would-be voter wearing blue jeans & a camo shirt walks up, then smiles at the gun-toting losers who smile back, what message is sent?
If a would-be voter wearing long scraggly hair, darker skin tones, or climbing out of a smoking beater of a car grimaces upon sight of the gun-toting losers who grimace back, what message is sent? What if the voter gets out of a shiny new Volvo carrying a Save the Earth tote bag? She doesn’t grimace at the fascists; instead she looks surprised / fearful & gives a shudder as she passes.
The intimidators don’t hang out at precincts where an overwhelming R majority is a foregone conclusion. They hang out at precincts where a few percent of voters turned away makes a difference.
Note that that turning away may not happen at the door. It may happen hours or days earlier when news spreads that fascists have staked out most or all the early voting locations in the county.
Yes. And early voters in general. Their guy Trump told them that real Americans only vote on election day and only in person.
Even though he personally voted by mail. 
Yep. Aside form the obvious indicators they might target, like race or demeanor, it’s just statistical. Liberal voters are in general more likely to use advance voting methods like drop boxes, so reducing the overall use of such methods pushes the voting trend towards the right. Even if they lose 100 votes for every 1000 the Democrats lose, it’s overall a winning strategy for them.
You need to give the secret Q hand signal in order for them to welcome you.
Considering the local attitudes in my purple state, I’m very, very glad to have all-by-mail voting here in Colorado. And that I can remotely check that my ballot was received and verified prior to the actual election date.
Things (R) seem to hate (unless its military) or for themselves when establishing residence as a PO BOX.
For the record at least, I haven’t seen people staking out either of the drop boxes (because I used one since I have 2 homes with Trump 2020 signs still up within sight of my home and will NOT put in through the mail due to the fact) near my home / on my commute.
Washington State has the same on both counts. Colorado and Washington should be examples for other states who don’t have similar features.
In Arizona, Maricopa county (at least) will send an email or text when a mailed or dropped off ballot is received, verified, and counted.* You do have to sign up with your contact info.
*Ballots received up through Sunday evening are counted, but the results not made public, before election day. Ballots received on Monday and election day are processed on Wednesday. Ballots received after the polls close on election day are discarded.
Sometimes it’s obvious who someone is voting for. When I was a Virginia voter in 2012, there were Republican and Democratic volunteers at the poll stations who would hand out voting guides to each voter - pink for (R), blue for (D.) Usually, people would only take the booklet for their side and decline the other’s. You could generally tell, just by which voters were holding which color of booklet, which side they were voting for.
I made a practice of holding both in my hands, so people couldn’t tell.
I guess my point is this: Back when I voted in person, nobody could have guessed for whom I was voting (and if they did, it would be just that - a guess).
If I were to approach a voting site on Tuesday, and there were “intimidators” there, I would simply stroll right past them, cast my vote in private, and stroll right past them again.
You cannot be intimidated without your permission.
(and I guess I should say that if things become physical, that is a different discussion. My OP is only in reference to those jackasses who plant themselves outside a polling place with a firearm and a glare)
mmm
Hey, look, you’ve just discovered the concept of “privilege”!
Yeah, but those sre Blue states. Wake-up, sheeple!
We have a newly defined congressional district, geographically, that includes the mountains up to Lake Tahoe and then south along the CA-NV border. It spans suburbs and a lot of rural areas. It’s unclear if the Democrat or the Republican running here have any advantage over one another. But, a big storm is heading in over the next few days and is likely to impact the mountains/rural voters with heavy snow and closed roads. Anyone who waits for election day to vote may not be able to. I guess Mother Nature will intimidate voters, too.
I’d love to see the Republican encourage people to vote early and by mail and endorse the whole vote by mail thing.
Dude. Intimidation is assault, which is the very definition of non-consensual.
Others mentioned “camo clad” men watching them through binoculars, taking photos of license plates, calling voters “mules,” and recording voters so closely that the names on their ballots could be seen. “I have never been more intimidated in my life tring [sic] to vote and standing only 3 feet from the box,” one complainant wrote. “…Now that have my Information recorded will they show up at my house… Do I need worry about my family being killed now if the results are not what they wanted.”
But, I’m sure they asked nicely first.
Hey, look, you are assuming you know my race.
mmm
What is your race?
Why do you assume they were referring tp a racial or ethnic privilege?