Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next few days they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.
They all know that federal law makes it a crime for federal law enforcement officers to enter polling places armed (unless there’s an active crime, like a shooting, going on), and it has been that way since 1865, which has them particularly worried about their own possible legal exposure.
Several also noted that what makes this concern particularly cogent and urgent is that they’ve already watched Trump’s and Blanche’s Justice Department use invented claims of “irregularities” to get a judge to sign a warrant that allowed them to march armed agents into Georgia election offices, broadcast on national television, with little blowback and no consequences.
One former senior agent told the reporters how the Bureau used to handle this:
“We were extremely careful about going nowhere near polling places, and [the FBI] even instructing agents to go unarmed to vote, just so there was never any whiff of federal activity near a polling place.”
The precedent was set, the wall was breached, when FBI agents raided the Fulton County election office in Atlanta on January 28 and carried out more than 600 boxes of ballots and records from the 2020 election with oversight by Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence. She said she was there on Trump’s personal instruction.
The warrant for that raid, according to Reuters, originated with a referral from Kurt Olsen, an election denier MAGA suck-up who Trump had enlisted to try to prove the long-debunked theory (that cost Fox “News” millions) that Dominion voting machines were secretly controlled from Venezuela.
Months earlier, Gabbard’s office had hauled voting machines out of Puerto Rico and hired a forensics contractor to tear them apart looking for the hack. While the contractor found some small vulnerabilities, as every voting machine audit does, they reported explicitly that there was no evidence whatsoever that even one single vote had been altered.
When that news reached the White House, Stephen Miller’s response was to push to bring in the FBI and seize more machines. Trump then named MAGA 2020 election denier Olsen the White House Director of Election Security. The FBI agents talking to MS NOW were unnerved by all that, and are now worried about what may be coming next.
The law they’re explicitly worried about breaking was passed in February of 1865, as the Civil War was still being fought (it ended in May of that year). Members of Congress were furious that President Abraham Lincoln had sent Union troops into polling places in Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, so they passed a law making it a federal felony for any federal official to bring “troops or armed men” to a place where an election is being held, unless it was necessary to “repel armed enemies of the United States.”
The penalty for a federal official to carry a gun into a polling place was specified as up to five years in prison along with a lifetime ban from holding federal office or a federal job, and it’s still on the books today.
Ironically, Congress wrote the law against Lincoln, but the principle that armed government agents in a polling place is both intimidating, election interference, and a federal crime has stood for 161 years.
For exactly 100 years, the Constitution and this law dictated that states run the elections, and the feds can’t go anywhere near them. Then, in 1965, that relationship was flipped upside down when, instead of federal Union Troops, it was the local Klan-connected racist southern sheriffs who were going armed into polling places to intimidate or arrest Black people who tried to vote. In response, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
That law turned the feds from the suspicious group that might mess with elections into the explicit protectors of the integrity of elections, regardless of the objections of local authorities. Feds still couldn’t enter with a gun — unless there was a crime being committed, as specified by the VRA.
Now the New York Times reports that secretaries of state are war-gaming how to respond to the possibility of ICE raids at polling places, misbehaving federal “monitors,” and/or federal attempts to seize votes or machines. The entire situation has flipped in just a single year. In the corrupt hands of Trump, Miller, Blanche, Mullin, and Patel, the question is now whether your state can protect your vote from Washington.
I’ve seen what impact armed federal agents showing up can have on things far less consequential than elections; back in the late 1960s when I was a young reporter and morning news anchor at WITL in Lansing, Michigan, a police officer and a federal agent walked into our newsroom one morning and asked us, politely but with an edge of threat of “consequences” to us (they wrote down our drivers’ licenses), to hold a story about a mass arrest they were about to make of anti-Vietnam War tax activists.
Over my protests, our news director went with their request. I’ve never forgotten how little “authority” it took to intimidate us.
Fear, in other words, often works. Dictators around the world figured this out centuries ago, and modern autocrats know that you don’t need to cancel elections to control their outcome.
In 2008, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe’s party lost the first round of a national election. In response, his federal police arrested more than 100 presiding officers and election officials on “election fraud” charges that Human Rights Watch described as politically motivated and designed to instill fear in the people running the vote. Mugabe’s candidates, not surprisingly, “won” the next round.
Nobody had to steal a ballot box; they just had to make every election worker in the country wonder if he’d be the next one carted off to prison. This is why the Trump administration just sent letters to election officials in every one of the 50 states warning them that they face years in brutal federal prisons if they process a single “illegal” ballot.
Political scientists call this “electoral authoritarianism,” and it’s how elections in Russia are run right now.Just look at the direction we’re moving; it’s as if Putin is walking Trump through it step-by-step:
— Trump told a podcaster in February that Republicans should “take over the voting” in 15 states.
— A draft executive order declaring a “national emergency over foreign election interference” has been circulating among his allies for months: both Senators Warner and Himes told MS NOW that, as a result, they’re preparing for the possibility that an exaggerated or fabricated intelligence claim gets used as the pretext to halt voting in Democratic areas.
— When FBI Director, former rightwing social media star, and Trump book author Ka$h Patel (his preferred spelling) was asked directly by Senator Blumenthal, he refused to commit to keeping armed federal agents away from the polls.
— Attorney General and former Trump criminal lawyer Todd Blanche told reporters he won’t rule out “postelection actions” and has publicly asked why sending armed federal immigration officers to polling places would even be objectionable.
— Homeland Security Secretary and former plumber Markwayne Mullin said ICE could be sent to voting sites.
— Shortly thereafter, Blanche’s Justice Department announced roughly 1,000 federal “monitors” for the midterms, deployed, he said, at the request of local Republican parties rather than in consultation with the officials who actually run the elections.
— Two weeks ago, Blanche’s Justice Department sent California a thumb drive with 20,000 names it called “likely noncitizens,” gave the state 48 hours to pull their ballots, and then warned Los Angeles County election workers that counting those ballots could be a violation of federal law that could lead to imprisonment.
— Trump posted the letter himself and added that they’d “all go to jail for a long period of time.”
— And we learned yesterday from Ken Klippenstein that Trump has mobilized the National Guard nationwide specifically for the election.
That’s Mugabe’s playbook: threaten the clerks, and the clerks will hesitate, particularly when your armed agents show up to cart off the voting machines or boxes of ballots.
Four federal lawsuits are now pending to keep armed agents away from the polls, including one filed by Arlington County, Virginia, which has just heightened the nervousness of the FBI agents who talked to MS NOW.
In The Hidden History of the War on Voting I traced how every generation of this country has had to fight essentially the same fight against “conservatives” over who gets to vote and who counts the votes. As Politifact notes:
"Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s former personal secretary, claimed that Stalin said: ‘Я считаю, что совершенно неважно, кто и как будет в партии голосовать; но вот что чрезвычайно важно, это кто и как будет считать голоса.’ It translates to: ‘I regard it as completely unimportant who in the party will vote and how, but it is extremely important who will count the votes and how.’”
So here we are a few days out. Vote early if your state allows it, put the Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, in your phone and use it the moment anything looks wrong.
Call your elected officials — both state and federal — and tell them you demand that they stand up to intimidation from Trump and his lickspittles. Congress was right in 1865, and that law is still on the books.
The government officials we’re voting for (or against) shouldn’t be deciding whose votes get counted and whose don’t, particularly if this bizarre replay of Mugabe’s efforts gets repeated here in America over the next week or so.
Pass it along.