Steve Bannon Proposes Using ICE in Elections
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
I'm not quite sure the answer. Maybe the west needs to get more serious about opposing that stuff?
US money paid to such firms also paid for Brexit.
"Internet Research Agency": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
Ironically, Britain backed the slaving south in the US Civil War; Britain wanted the south the secede from the Union.
The film National Treasure: Book of Secrets mentions this.
It's user error, and trying to fix it without changing the minds and wants of those users just makes them angrier that "the Elites are undermining the will of the People" or whatever.
-- Richard Nixon, 1973; US Supreme Court, 2024
It's a road map to where we end up with a similar document but a different culture.
This isn't a crazy or impossible proposition, it can be done with just a law. We already form some courts in a similar way, so it's also not unprecedented. It even avoids the naked partisanship of a simple court-packing.
As far as I can tell, nobody who matters is talking about it yet. So. Hope is... remote.
Years down the road, maybe some judge will rule ICE’s actions violated voters’ Constitutional rights, but who cares? The standard punishment for that is a stern “don’t do it again”. If someone is convicted because of a rights violation, their conviction might be overturned, but that’s not what would happen here: it would just be intimidation and harassment to move vote totals and no conviction to be reversed.
(As of early 2026, 29 states allow permitless (constitutional) concealed carry of firearms in most public spaces, while 21 states still generally require a permit. Major permitless carry states include Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and Arizona. While 47 states allow some form of open carry, California, Illinois, and New York prohibit it)
You are responsible for protecting you, no one else is or will. Know the law, operate within it to the best of your ability and from a position of good faith. Failing all of that, a jury will work it out.
https://www.thetrace.org/2024/10/state-gun-bans-polling-plac...
Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun. (A Talk About Risk and Preparedness) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509164 - November 2022
And, to be perfectly clear, it is reasonable to shoot that person on sight. But so far only Texas has codified it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law#United_S... (status by US state)
So if you show up at the polls and someone threatens you, it appears you have to turn around and run away.
There is a real possibility that these agents will continue detainment of people, even if they are US citizens, as they are trying to vote. Perhaps they will use their facial recognition app, Mobile Fortify (built by NEC), to identify people and decide if they’re a likely GOP voter or not. Who knows. Whatever they do, this feels like a serious threat to American democracy.
2. Allow the crowd to yell at them.
3. Use the crowd agitation as an opportunity to escalate and go "hands on".
4. Cause a ruckus.
5. Use the ruckus as justification for closing the polling location for the rest of the day.
6. Count the Republican votes, discard the Dem votes.
7. Declare landslide victory.
8. Ignore calls for extended voting or recounts.
The process is so blunt, so blatant, it's surprising that it works. I'm guessing it's the result of years and years of lessening the american people so that they can roll over in the most undignified way.
However, using the goon squad to illegally intimidate and disenfranchise voters is a problem large enough that calling it a would-be distraction from the Epstein files is doing everyone a disservice.
We have to pay attention to more than one thing. Saying <blank> is just a distraction from <blank-2>, means that you're too distracted by <blank-2> and need to step back and look around at all the other horrors.
Spoiler: ~50% of goals met in Trump's first year.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I'm honestly disappointed to see this flagged. What's the saying, "Even an SEO farm is right twice a day"?
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
You could argue it's an interesting new phenomenon?
The same story is in loads of publications.
I also expect:
1) Lawsuits, subpoenas, and indictments against and of elections offices and key officials in Democratic areas of vulnerable Republican districts, timed to mess with their ability to even function. If it suppresses the vote that's a "nice to have" but mostly this is to sow uncertainty about the elections both by generating ginned-up headlines (it doesn't matter if the investigations actually find anything or go anywhere) and by delaying vote counting and causing chaos (e.g. very long lines) on Election Day, which opens up greater space for the GOP to act after the elections.
2) Challenges of the outcomes by the administration and their proxies, and outright calls for Republicans to pull certification tricks akin to the fake-elector crime they attempted in '20. This would be supported by #1, and by ICE-created chaos and vote suppression.
Incidentally, the ICE intervention can take many forms, the most extreme of which (and most effective to the admin) is triggering violence (a lot of people are going to react poorly to being asked "papers, please" by a small squad of armed & armored federal thugs on the way to vote) that actually shuts down polling places in key locations. This both heavily suppresses the vote in areas they've targeted, and serves their "chaos! Democrats are trying to cheat by letting illegals vote! See how much they freak out when we don't let them?" narrative. The lighter version is some cautious shows-of-force and unrealized threats ahead of time, aimed at gentler levels of vote suppression (if you're a citizen but have an accent and aren't white, you might think twice about your odds of getting to the polls without getting locked up for a day or two and losing perhaps five figures you may not have attaining your release, and just stay home, even if ICE ends up not showing or just doing some show-of-force drive-bys that end up all over social media)
I'd love to know what, if anything, state governments are planning to prevent any of this. I've personally not been able to think of a single effective thing they can do about it as far as actually keeping it from happening or recovering quickly from the material harm it does (winning much later in the court of public opinion, for whatever that's worth, is another matter, as is eventually winning in court) but maybe there's something.
(I rate all the above fairly likely, in some form; my outside-but-not-impossible-odds guess is they'll seize some ballot drop boxes or enroute mail-in ballots with nebulous claims of wrongdoing that don't go anywhere but do fuck up specific districts' voting processes, with, as usual, no relief from the courts because by the time anything can be done about it it's a fait accompli and nobody's gonna trust those ballots after the feds have had them, anyway)
The second thing they can do is ensure the police force is on their side. Remove officers that would collaborate with attempts to overthrow an election. Require training, monitor social media, ensure qualified immunity cannot protect them, and make sure they are aware.
A seat that is likely to flip is probably going to be a relatively close race.
There are a bunch of public and private sources you can use, and databases both parties have already compiled, to find out which polling places are likely to be overwhelmingly visited by one party's voters over the other.
A majority of one in the House, and a tie in the Senate, is all the White House needs to mostly prevent Congress from messing with them much (though larger margins are better).
Combine all these facts and they have more than enough ICE agents to have a huge effect on the outcomes. They only need to show up in a handful of specific places to completely change the course of the next couple years.
Which they have been. How did that go in the special election a few days ago?
> This is electionist cope. The elections are decided in a handful of states with narrow margins.
And the other guy's point was that the backlash against Trump is significant enough that this time around elections may not be decided that way. As evidence: A Texas district that was Republican for 25 years, that voted Republican by a 17% margin in November 2024, just elected a Democrat by 14% (after he'd already won by 12% in November 2025).
This is separate from the obvious fact that House seats are decided in district elections and are all up for grabs this year.