It’s been clear for awhile that Trump is very likely to lose a fair election. I’ve been worrying about what happens if the election is not fair. There’s a lot of ways the election can be stolen. We’ve been watching the Republicans fight tooth and nail to make it harder for people to vote these last weeks. They will keep fighting after the election to try to invalidate votes that were cast, which is where I think the real danger lies. But in this essay I want to focus on election day itself, intimidation at the voting place.

In general in America, intimidating voters is illegal. It is a federal crime to “intimidate, threaten, [or] coerce any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] other person to vote or to vote as he may choose.” On Tuesday if you are intimidated or see voter intimidation, please report it. The ACLU hotline is 1-866-OUR-VOTE, the Democratic Party’s hotline is 1-833-336-8683, and the US DoJ’s hotline is 800-253-3931. Despite the law, America has a long ugly history of voter intimidation, particularly against Black voters.

The recent history starts with the Ballot Security Task Force of 1981. This was a group of Republican-organized off duty police officers hired in New Jersey to maraud African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods on election day. They verbally and physically intimidated voters and blocked access to the polls. This action and various other Republican-led voter intimidation efforts was so egregious the Republicans were forced into a consent decree to not suppress the vote, with significant federal oversight. That agreement expired in 2017.

So now the Republicans no longer have their hands tied and seem to be reverting to various forms of voter suppression and intimidation. Many of them are murky and on the margins, so first let’s clarify the simplest cases of how voters could be intimidated.

US Military: It is illegal for the US military to be at polling places. 18 U.S. Code § 592 makes this very clear. No one considers this a real threat in 2020.

National Guard: it is legal for the various National Guards to help at polling places if requested by the state. Generally, unarmed and out of uniform. Mostly they’re asked to serve as poll workers; set up tables, help run the polling station. It’s historically been calm and uncontroversial. In 2020 there has been concern about some states calling up the National Guard for security; Mike Abbott in Texas, for instance. The assumption at the moment is they’re only on standby in case of violence. If they enter any polling stations armed or in uniform, it will be a very alarming turn of events.

State and local police: it depends on state law, but in many states it is legal for police to be at a polling place, in uniform and armed. In five states it’s required! Voter intimidation is still illegal, but it’s easy to see how the mere presence of an armed white cop watching voters could be intimidating for voters, particularly Black voters. It is what it is; the main problem to look for is a pattern of deliberate police intimidation.

Barr’s Army: this summer Trump and Barr created an unregulated paramilitary organization. They attacked peaceful protestors in Washington DC so that Trump could do a photo op, then later occupied parts of Portland for several weeks. Much of that army is made of civilian DHS agents who are not subject to military regulations. It’s entirely unclear whether it would be legal for this force to show up at a polling place, although it would certainly be a frightening turn to facism.

Unlawful militias: it is completely illegal for a random armed citizens group to show up at or near a polling place and intimidate voters. That doesn’t mean there’s no risk of it happening. The only appropriate response would be a swift capture and arrest by local or national law enforcement.

Poll watchers: there’s lots of room under “poll watchers” and “voting advocates” to have potentially hostile people in a polling place. Passive poll watching is fine, but it’s possible to abuse the role or the access to disenfranchise voters. Trump has made a lot of noise about having watchers to stop imaginary voting fraud, but “poll watching” is also a classic intimidation technique. There’s been some troubling signs of who’s being recruited to be poll watchers: ex-special forces and retired police in Minnesota for instance. Note the organization of those watchers is literally called Trump’s Army; the militarized language is not an accident.

Random people: I put this here because it’s just so American: in some states like Michigan an individual can carry a gun while voting. I assume it’d be illegal for them to do anything with the gun but why the hell is it even allowed?

That’s all the niceties of the law. The reality on the ground could be very different. If a few hundreds ICE thugs show up at a Philadelphia polling place on Tuesday in anonymous uniforms with grenades and assault weapons in hand, what’s going to happen? An emergency court order, several hours of chaos, and a suppressed vote. What if rumors spread in Detroit that there’s a group of militia guys running around threatening to shoot people near the polling places? How many people won’t take the risk to go vote?

The only thing stopping voting intimidation in the moment is basic decency. But the Republicans have a history of not caring about decency. I don’t think they’d go so far as an armed coup but there’s plenty of room at the margins for intimidating enough voters to affect the vote. Know your rights. Report any intimidation: 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Trump is very likely going to lose a fair vote; do not let him steal this election.

Like everyone I’m riding out this Covid-19 lockdown with a mix of depression, anxiety, anger, boredom. And obsessively reading every detailed quality article I can find about both the disease and the politics around the disease. And it’s just all too much. Ordinarily my goal is to research something and get at some truth people don’t know about, then report it. I did this a couple of weeks ago about an unfounded theory that SARS-CoV-2 was in California last fall.

But right now there’s so many awful things going on. And I go deep on some topic and it doesn’t matter because it’s just all too much. People don’t care about the details of some particular nuance of antibody test specificity and Bayesian statistics. They just want to know “is the medical science going to make us safe?” “Are our politicians doing a good job helping us be safe?”

The top level answer on medical science is “science will make us safe, but it takes time”. The top level on the politics is “America is doing a terrible job”. The Trump administration is full of vandals and science deniers. Trump himself seems worried only in trying to save his re-election chances and lurches day to day to new outrages. Some of the states, including California, are doing better but it’s all going way too slow. My particular anger is focussed on the lack of testing capacity. We are way below what we need to safely reopen the country.

Anyway, it’s all too much. So rather than meticulously run down a bunch of complicated stories I’m just going to list a bunch of the big outrages with minimal references, just so I don’t lose track or forget that they have happened.

• 50,000 Americans confirmed dead of Covid-19 today.

• 2500+ American dying every day of the disease.

• Trump’s denying the disease was important, wasting six weeks.

• Armchair epidemiologists arguing about what the “true” death rate of Covid-19 is.

• An enormous lack of testing capacity.

• Federal government refusing to provide medical supplies to states that need them, telling them to buy their own.

• Federal government stealing medical supplies from states.

• Federal government distributing medical supplies with political favoritism.

• Potential fraudulent diversion of Federally-seized medical supplies.

• Trump’s fixation on Chloroquine, an unproven medical treatment. causing a shortage for proven uses of the medicine. It turns out to not work.

• Trump suggesting we inject “disinfectant” into Covid-19 patients.

• Trump firing the US leader on vaccine development because he was skeptical of unproven medical treatments.

• Trump simultaneously saying it’s up to the states to choose when to re-open and then undermining those states’ decisions.

• Trump and his campaign’s apparent cooperation with far right wing groups astroturfing “reopen America” protests.

• Trump shutting down some immigration including green card applications.

• Enormous economic cost to the country and the world.

• Whole industries decimated; hospitality foremost.

• The stomach-churning gyrations of the crude oil market.

• Failed government stimulus for small businesses.

• Republicans doing everything they could to suppress a fair election in Wisconsin, including forcing people to risk their lives to vote.

• Trump declaring war against voting by mail, our best hope for having a fair and safe election in November.

• A $2T aid package where the oversight committee was sabotaged before it started.

• Mendacious one-time personal payout delayed so Trump could put his name on the checks.

• Fascists threatening the life of Anthony Fauci, the one trusted medical leader in this crisis.

• CDC’s failure of leadership.

• CDC’s failure to produce a working test, including weeks of screwing around with a contaminated test and an overcomplicated design.

• Republican sabotage of the CDC, the pandemic response team, and the WHO.

• Appointing a crude and vicious racist to be spokesman of Health and Human Services.

It’s not a comprehensive list, it’s just the outrages of the last two months I could remember offhand. It’s too much.

If you made it all the way to the bottom of this bummer post, let me give you one silver lining in the Covid-19 cloud. J. Kenji López-Alt, my favorite food nerd, has been doing an excellent series of home cooking videos. They are a delight.

Democrats cab win a whole lot of seats in Congress this year, quite possibly even taking control of the Senate. There are 15 Senatorial elections that are not solid locks; of those, 13 are currently held by Republicans. And there’s some 64 close House races.

I just made 25 donations to campaigns for the Senate and the House. I hate the idea of paying in to American campaign financing and it’s a lot of work figuring out who to donate to. But making donations like this in 2018 made me feel like an active participant in the political process. It’s like buying tickets for your hometown baseball team, then keeping track of how your team does. It’s engagement. So I’m back again this year.

My main criterion is “support the Democrat in close races”. I am not aiming for every candidate to win; that’d be money wasted. I give money where it might make a difference. Some more sophisticated people than me also look to donate in races that are underfunded or otherwise worth special attention. Swing Left does an excellent job packaging this kind of analysis up in a single one-stop donation form, plus advice on how you can volunteer your time. Read on here if you’d rather do it yourself.

My primary source of information for which races are close is the Cook Political Report: Senate and House. Ballotpedia is also a very useful source of information about specific races, including candidate funding and likelihood of winning. See their battlegrounds pages for more info: Senate and House. Finally the WashPo recently did a great article on Senate races that is a useful guide.

For the Senate, I ended up donating to 13 of 15 close races. The candidates are Gary Peters MI, Doug Jones AL, Mark Kelly AZ, John Hickenlooper CO, Jon Ossoff GA, Theresa Greenfield IA, Sarah Gideon ME, Cal Cunningham NC, MJ Hegar TX, Barbara Bollier KS, Jamie Harrison SC, Amy McGrath KY, and Steve Bullock MT.

Alaska hasn’t had their primary yet, so I’m waiting on that. There’s also a special election in Georgia

but the November race is effectively a jungle primary, so again I’m waiting. I only spent a couple minutes looking at each candidate’s political positions, mostly to verify they were OK on LGBT rights. I’m sure I disagree with some of them on some things.

For the House, in 2018 I mostly gave to the close California races. But this year there’s only 3 close races in CA, so I expanded my list to include 3 races I knew something about the candidate and then 5 more left-wing candidates from the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Justice Democrats. The candidates are Christy Smith CA-25,

TJ Cox CA-21, Harley Rouda CA-48, Hiral Tipirneni AZ-06, Hillary Scholten MI-03, Lizzie Fletcher TX-07, Angie Craig MN-02, Matt Cartwright PA-08, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell FL-26, Andy Kim NJ-03, and Kara Eastman NE-02.

Finally I gave one special donation to my most local candidate: Audrey Denney for CA-01 including Grass Valley, CA. The Cook Report doesn’t show it as a close race but I think it’s closer than it looks; the current Republican LaMalfa is a real loser, less popular even than Donald Trump. And Denney ran a strong campaign in 2018 and is looking even better this year.

Donating online is remarkably easy; all but one of these candidates are using ActBlue, an excellent product. See my earlier blog post about avoiding spam when you donate; in particular do not give ActBlue or any candidate your phone number or primary email address.

I would like to add a caveat to all this optimism, which is that I’m basing it on there being a fair vote. But I give a ~10% chance of massive voting fraud conducted by the GOP resulting in a deeply unfair election. Not just the usual voter suppression and structural bias towards the GOP. But some broad and enormous combination of invalidating or not counting vote-by-mail ballots and using Barr’s Army to intimidate vote counters similar to what was done in Miami in 2000. I honestly don’t know how to fight this kind of coup, the best I’ve done so far is donate to voting rights agencies like the Brennan Center and the ACLU.