[The Soup Nazi]

(cont'd)

On the Republican side being free of court supervision for the first time since 1981

This is the first time in 40 years that we're going to have a presidential election without a court supervising the Republican "ballot security operations" on Election Day. Republicans were caught doing all kinds of voter suppression and intimidation in 1981, and a lawsuit against the Republican National Committee placed the RNC under a consent decree, a court order, that forbade it to use many methods of voter purging, voter intimidation. The Republicans had rounded up large numbers of law enforcement and former military people wearing armbands and guns, carrying radios, confronting voters and demanding evidence of their right to vote, warning them that it's a felony to vote when you're not eligible in the correct neighborhood, confronting poll workers who tried to help voters as they're legally allowed to do. This was in New Jersey, but it was a nationwide consent decree. And the methods that had been used in New Jersey were widely known methods and had been used for decades to suppress, in particular, the votes of people of color in this country. ...

And there was a consent decree here that lasted for decades, and it expired in 2018. And this time the Election Day operations of the Republican side are going to be free of court supervision. They're going to be able to decide for themselves how they operate that day, and maybe they'll be sued after the fact, but it will be too late to make much difference in terms of the outcome. The Trump campaign is recruiting what it's calling "an army for Trump." The president's son [Donald Trump Jr.] has gone on television calling for "all able-bodied men and women" — Why able-bodied? What kind of physical confrontation does he have in mind at the polls? — "all able-bodied men and women to stop the election from being stolen by Democrats."

On some of the other ways Trump might contest results

I think there's reasonable concern that when the president and his son are using the rhetoric they're using about the need to secure an election against people trying to steal it, when the president has supporters who are prepared to carry weapons and to appoint themselves into militia-like roles, there's a significant concern that there will be violence or physical disorder at the polls on election night and afterward during the canvass.

Here we get purely into the realm of speculation, but I think with a president like Trump who has shown a complete disregard for boundaries of law and norms, we have to worry also about what he might do that no one's done before. He's the incumbent president. He's the chief law enforcement officer of the country under the Constitution. He's the commander in chief of the armed services. What is he prepared to do in terms of deployment of U.S. forces? Is he prepared to order postal inspectors to seize and impound mail-in ballots on grounds that they have been forged or that there's been an investigation into foreign fraud and therefore all those ballots must be seized and frozen in place and not counted? Is he prepared to send in U.S. marshals or Justice or [Department of Homeland Security] officials from other sub agencies to secure the peace, to secure the ballots, to preserve evidence, ostensibly. There are a lot of ways this could go very badly. And I think that no president has done it before. There are laws that would seem to constrain him from doing that. But I have little doubt that Bill Barr, the attorney general, is capable of finding executive authority for the president to do whatever he likes on Election Day. The question to me is, really, whether he thinks he can get away with it.

On what we can do to prepare for Election Day

I think because the mail-in ballots are going to be so much the subject of litigation, I've changed my own mind personally on how I'm going to vote. I'm going to vote in person because I think the worst case is that the president is ahead on election night and that a fuller count of the vote over coming days and weeks shows that Biden wins. That's a very bad case because you have the possibility of weeks of serious disturbance in between.

I think anyone who can volunteer to be a poll worker should do so. I think if you know anyone who is open to reason, you should make sure they know that it's normal and natural and lawful and proper for the count to continue to change after election night and that it's sure to do so this time.

And then think about where you stand in relation to the election. If you were a mayor, you might want to think about how you deploy your police on Election Day to prevent the intervention of outsiders with bad intent. If you are a law enforcement officer, think about how the primacy of your mission to protect the vote, the most fundamental right we have in this country. If you're a member of the military chain of command, you should pause to remember that you have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders and think about ways in which you might be misused during the course of an election.

If you're a civil servant, we need you more than ever, I think, to say "no" to the wrong thing, to do the right thing, when you're asked to do the wrong thing. You go down the list. There are a lot of people who have an influence over, broadly speaking, this moment of transition in this country between one presidential administration and another. And it may be a second term for Trump. I certainly don't rule out that he could be reelected legitimately. But we have to make sure that the vote is counted, that all the votes are counted and that the election is decided by the voters and not by some other machinations.