White House ‘can’t guarantee’ ICE won’t send agents to midterm voting sites
www.independent.co.uk
Threat of stationing immigration agents around voting locations has become a concern as it can be a deterrent to legal residents of color who are concerned they may be harassed by federal agents

Threat of stationing immigration agents around voting locations has become a concern as it can be a deterrent to legal residents of color who are concerned they may be harassed by federal agents

The White House refused to rule out following through on the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents being sent out to “surround the polls” when voters cast ballots in this November’s midterm elections as a way of depressing Democratic turnout and boosting chances of Republican victories in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday said she could offer “no guarantee” that ICE personnel would not be stationed at polling sites when Americans are in the process of choosing whether to extend the Republican stranglehold on power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

She had been asked about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s recent call for Trump to deploy ICE around election sites on his War Room podcast on Tuesday, just days after Trump himself called for a Republican “takeover” of vote-counting in Democratic-led states and municipalities.

  • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    5·
    9 hours ago

    That’s effectively what’s happening.

    The USPS, under DeJoy (who has long been trying to undermine the USPS from within), has posted this site, which attempts to debunk (i.e., gaslight) over what the change is. They claim the same process applies and only is being clarified, but that’s false since now postmarks will use the process rather than the sending date and that’s a major change. This is key:

    While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location. [emphasis added]

    This is entirely to help support GOP legal challenges that will claim that laws which allow election-day postmarked mail-in ballots to be counted can be struck down, because they will encompass votes that took place after election day, and therefore selectively invalidate mail-in ballots. It’s essentially poisoning the reliability of postmarks to allow for ballot suppression.

    Here’s a PBS story about it as well. It also notes that the staffing crunches at the USPS and closing processing facilities will exacerbate the issue since “processing” times will increase, especially for high-volume days like election day.

    Edit: David Steiner, not DeJoy, is the current postmaster general.