As callous as it sounds, the street murders of two US citizens exercising their constitutional rights is not the biggest threat facing the country right now. The regime has made a direct assault on free and fair elections by raiding the Fulton County, Georgia, election center and seizing ballots stored under seal from the 2020 election. The contamination of evidence means that any "revelations" by the regime are automatically suspect, but don't expect that to stop them.
The current occupant of the Oval Office has already said that he wished that he had seized ballots and voting machines in 2020 to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Biden was confirmed as the winner of the 2020 presidential election numerous times, as the MAGA regime filed suit after suit, and lost all of them.
While much of the current brouhaha is driven by the thin-skinned and senile dictator's thirst for revenge against imagined wrongs, the forces that have slunk in under cover of his bombast have had their sights on limiting voting rights for decades. Each segment has their favorite targets: the religious right tends to want to keep women from voting. The white supremacists want to keep Black and brown people from voting. The corporatists want to keep the poors from voting.
We on the so-called left would prefer if the supporters of each and all of these enemies of liberty would stop voting that way, but I'd like to think that most of us recognize that blocking anyone's right to vote is a dangerous weapon, lest it be snatched away and used against us.
Unfortunately, we can't try to tell the oppressors that they will be no worse off, and perhaps better, by letting everyone participate. The super rich love being super rich. Falling back to merely filthy rich from obscenely rich would definitely impact their lifestyle. Insecure men who need women to be automatically subservient will have to face more and more women who have no need for them.
Elections aren't going away: authoritarian regimes need them to provide the illusion of legitimacy. Election subversion, on the other hand, is a key element in assuring that the designated winner has a comfortable margin. Deftly done, it can even give the opposition party a shred of hope that some day the system might go their way.
Close electoral margins in actual count give the regime the sense that opinion might really favor them, at least by a slim majority. That's why a big turnout is essential to lay down a number that is harder to deny and falsify. If they have to take away ballots by the truckload, it's harder to conceal than just lugging out a couple of file boxes late at night.
While we can fantasize about firefights at polling places, as MAGA supporters literally battle 2A progressives, such fireworks are highly unlikely. We've seen how voter suppression actually works: polling places scattered over hundreds of square miles; long lines; no food or water; maybe some goons in tactical gear slouching around. And ICE, if still cosplaying in full military kit and snatching people might grabs as many brown voters as they can, holding them until election day is over. No need to stick their catch in camps or deport them. Just keep them from voting. Sure, there will be lawsuits, but it will be too late to change the outcome of the election.
White people should be fine as long as they (we) don't smart off or kick any taillights. But that puts a lot of responsibility on us to represent for our less privileged brothers and sisters who might be getting more shit as they try to make their way to the polls.
Maybe we reach a point where the supporters of the regime wear clothing or accessories that mark them clearly. A lot of them already do, but it's not a mandatory uniform item. If they adopt the attitude that "if you're not with us you're against us," and extend that to heavy peer pressure to wear the mark of their beast, anyone planning to vote against them will have to choke down that wardrobe choice to mask our intent.
Violence is always a possibility when dealing with people who glorify their ability to dish it out and take it. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but it's central to their identity. Like any bully, they definitely enjoy beating up on someone they perceive as weaker. So maybe some self-dramatizing popgun patriot starts something somewhere, but it's unlikely. Don't want to risk messing up their costume.
A lot of polling places won't notice anything unusual at all. In my little town, people don't tend to put on their fight face for national elections. We save that for town meeting and school district hearings. Even then, it's been quite a few years since our last fist fight. And we don't have any brown people to exclude, even if someone was so inclined. That's one reason that so many people just chuckle about anyone who shows visible signs of getting upset at the problems we see on the news. It's still mostly theoretical to the people around here, so they treat it like a sport that may or may not interest them. That's a problem, but good luck figuring out how to instill a sense of urgency in a population so isolated for generations.
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