this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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electoralism
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not for nothing, but there are sure to be places it won't be like this. voting in the suburbs or in majority white/affluent places is invariably chill, in my experience. in places where poor people and minorities are clustered, it can be a different story, especially if it looks like a long established political machine might be upset.
for example, maybe 6 weeks ago, Texas shuttered a shitload of the voting locations in Tarrant County, which is in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and about 75% non-white. there's bound to be confusion about where people who live there are supposed to actually vote. i have no doubt the messaging around "voting in the wrong place" and "voting illegally" is going to be conflated and discourage people. the establishment, when called out, claimed they needed to do this for "efficiency". everything is bigger in Texas, and the bullshit is no exception. https://abcnews.com/Politics/advocates-rally-midterm-voters-after-dozens-polling-sites/story?id=137615179
when it's gonna be close, or perceived to be close, the dirty tricks come out. the easiest move is to target the minority vote because if you make voting take more than an hour for that cohort, they will leave the line because they've got to get back to work.
Broward County FL has been the poster child for shit like this since 2000. specifically, leaving machines in storage to make the wait longer. the dems mostly do it in the primaries to clamp down on the left. the republicans do it in the general for the same reason.
and believe: people do the calculus to know what percentage they can get to leave by the perceived length of the line. who has the time to complain? the local news tends to be owned by the same bazillionaire who is funding the machine anyway.
sometimes i wonder what sort of place this would be with an actual democracy. like one where elections are not run by partisan offices, ranked choice systems, and the district system was completely scrapped and converted to something immutable, but practical like watersheds.
Yeah, I think OP’s post is oretty telling that they live in an affluent/white district
Yeah, I don't deny that I live in a very white town within a very white state, and everything @came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net points out is correct. However, I don't believe it is POC communities that are acting as frantic doomsayers about the midterms, since everything @came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net pointed out has been the historical norm for a very long time. Part of that "nothing ever happens" includes nothing good happening either, like an improvement in the voting conditions for marginalized communities. That was never really on the table though; I think we know that. The doomsayers are white liberals from my assessment, which holds true in my personal circles at least. People I know have told me that this midterm was going to be cancelled, that the results would be overruled, and that "they" (white liberals) would be "silenced" by Donald Trump if we don't "do something" (aka
). My town (full of old white boomer retirees) had the state police run a drill inside our town hall about a week ago to prepare for ICE showing up at the polls.
Republicans won’t shut down the midterms, they already know, as someone pointed out, they don’t need to, it’s not worth it. But there’s really all sorts of ways to tip the scalesc such as what you mentioned, ICE intimidation
libs also said bush was going to cancel elections too.
of course, the bushes did have a recount canceled to start his presidency.... so maybe the unrealistic lib doomsday on voting day prediction thing is also part of the background radiation / nothing ever happens and not noteworthy? i mean if we're going to dismiss phenomena that have been around for years just because they've been happening already in some form.
at a certain point though, if nothing ever counts as happening, then what are we even looking for to comment on anymore?
I'm a white labor aristocrat nepo baby who lives in an affluent white suburb and vooted today. Can confirm it was chill.
wonder not, this was all considered after the american mutiny by the founding fathers who were eager to take up the british imperial project after they sanitized it with a name change. they concluded upon several ways to control the "levelling impulses of the masses" in order to avoid your suggestions. parenti describes this quite well