I had a solemn conversation with a leading regional law enforcement official this week, and asked him whether there have been any conversations among the scores of local and regional public safety agencies he’s constantly in touch with about a possible scenario for the November midterm elections.
That “worst case” scenario would, I suggested, involve federal forces like ICE seeking to enforce a presidential edict to cancel the elections by showing up at polling places to block public access to voting.
Surely, there is enough buzz in the press and online about such a possibility nowadays that no one, even my friend in this case, can claim to be entirely unfamiliar with the notion.
He said that there have been no such discussions. But he added that he, his agencies, and others like his are “duty bound” and “sworn” to protect the citizens of the local or regional jurisdictional entities they are hired to to perform any and all such functions.
Since all elections in the U.S. are run by localities and not the federal government, it could be assumed that he was suggesting the natural role of his and other entities would be to protect the public’s right to vote against any outside incursion.
That’s surely encouraging, but not so much is the admission that there have been no explicit conversations among his circles about this matter.
This is despite the fact that following two extraordinary events in the Washington, D.C. region in the last couple dozen years, the 911 attacks of 2001 that included a plane flying directly into the Pentagon and the violent insurrection against the nation’s capitol in D.C. on January 6, 2021, extraordinary efforts have led to a far greater communications integration among the 40 to 50 separate public safety entities that serve in the Northern Virginia segment of the D.C. area, alone.
My friend’s hand held device is able to access the channels of any of those entities at any given time, he said.
But in a private call just last week being reported in the media, Department of Homeland Security official Heather Honey’s vow to election officials around the country that ICE would not be at the polls in November has left some important people quite unconvinced.
According to a report on the call in the online news outlet Bulwark, “Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who was on the line, waved away Honey’s promises as empty on account of her past efforts pushing the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.”
Fontes told Politico, “I can’t depend on an election denier like that for the truth under any circumstances.” Honey was an activist in Pennsylvania whose research Trump attempted to use to overturn the 2020 election.
After all, Trump has already called to “nationalize” elections, and Republicans in the House passed the SAVE America Act, which stipulates national voter ID requirements to stem voting by “illegal aliens,” as the president alleged is happening in his State of the Union speech.
In his opinion piece in this Tuesday’s Washington Post, veteran columnist Keith B. Richburg offered the sobering notion that “People Power Is Not What Ends Dictatorships,” as read the piece’s headline. It appeared in the context of deliberations about the future of Iran, but the subject matter should be applied equally domestically.
Public uprisings, in and of themselves, have been unsuccessful in overthrowing repressive regimes, he pointed out, citing Tiananmen Square among other examples. On the other hand, the case of the successful 1998 overthrow of strongman Suharto in Indonesia that he witnessed first hand was different.
“Thousands of protesters armed with Molotov cocktails had been facing off against heavily armed riot police in Jakarta. When the marines showed up, I was expecting a bloodbath. But, surprisingly, the marines inserted themselves between the protesters and the police, backs to the protesters, daring the police to fire. Some scuffles ensued, but the marines ultimately forced the police to back off. At that moment, it became clear that Suharto was finished.”
