Assume you live in a country 50/50 red and blue people. Red wins the election and the new leader cracks down on the blues hard for how they look. Replace this with any arbitrary law that benefits one group at the expense of another for no purpose.
Assuming one of the arbitrary rules is not to destroy the elections (yet), and blue manages to gain back control, the same arbitrary power now falls into blue hands. You will rarely see power being returned (the root cause of rot), and now blue is free to make arbitrary rules and persecute any color they wish. In effect, red voted against their interests long-term, for short-term advantage.
At the moment we have masked and license plate tampering hit squads (with no accountability, they can claim even a daylight bank robbery wasn’t ICE.. try to prove or fight it).
Imagine the next president is a man like Putin, with not just the intelligence, but the will to seize permanent control. We’re handing keys to our jailers over overblown online rhetoric and fear. Now we’re targeting specific groups, profiling based on if they look “illegal”. Where have we seen this happen before and leading to a second war?
STOP giving the government power people. It doesn’t end well. Of the people and for the people only works when don’t give deity-like power to our stewards.