This election is a raging dumpster fire of misery. And there’s one reason for that: Donald Trump has been spreading lies to his cult of stupid people, telling them that there is widespread voter fraud despite all evidence to the contrary, because he has been losing.
Yet, this country wasn’t founded by slouches. Sure, they had no indoor plumbing and had certain other obvious flaws (like, uh, you know, support for slavery). But our Founders did anticipate just the kind of electoral theft that Trump is trying to perpetrate. Over the centuries, the safeguards against a big orange dummy stealing the election have filtered through the various levels of government, right on down to the local polling station.
I can’t speak for all counties throughout the country. But I can speak for mine. That’s because I served as an election judge this year.
“Wait a minute,” my regular readers might say. “You’re a partisan hack! How can you be an election judge?”
Absolutely true. I would much prefer a Joe Biden administration to four more years of the country I love crumbling into the dustbin of history. I don’t think that is a surprise to anyone who has ever read pretty much anything I have written.
But, in this state at least, not only is partisan hackery not a disqualifier: it’s a requirement. Election judges here must declare their party of preference, and certain election tasks may only be completed by two election judges, one of either major party. These tasks include helping a curbside voter with special needs cast a vote, and delivering the ballots at the end of the night. In such sensitive tasks, there is an election judge for each major party keeping each other honest. No one casts a ballot without judges of both parties overseeing the validity of the process.
Maybe a more one-off consideration this year is why I’m serving as an election judge at all. This is a first for me, not because I don’t think it’s an important task, but because I just assumed people generally had it covered before. This year, I was asked to serve as an election judge. The city I am working for was having trouble finding people.
My head judge called me about 10 days before the election, sounding a bit worried. She asked me how comfortable I am with confronting people. Very, I said. As important context to that, I am a muscular white litigator in his mid-30s. It went without saying that my presence alone would be an asset against the dumbfuckery we’re all expecting this year, given that poll workers are usually on the older and frailer side of physicality. We have relied so heavily on the patriotic service of retired folks to work the polls that we have taken for granted not only the importance, but the relative difficulty, of the task. This time around, we have to specifically combat susceptibility to intimidation on the parts of voters and election workers. Much of this has always been a problem, but now we’ve all been made more aware of it. Like it or not, steps had to be taken against physical intimidation at the polls this year. And they were.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention Minnesota Voters All. v. Mansky, 138 S. Ct. 1876 (2018). What a word-salad of judicial punting that train wreck of an opinion is. At any rate, the very least we can derive from it is that voters in certain states probably can’t wear shirts or buttons or hats directly promoting the candidates on the ballots (if they want to cast a vote, anyway). As to what else may or may not be prohibited, your guess is as good as mine. But rest assured, we election judges have at least tried to keep the MAGA hats and sun’s-out-guns-out Biden tank tops from entering the polling place.
So, there you have it. Hopefully by the time you’re reading this we have a free and fair election result that you can be a little more assured of the validity of by reading this column. And hopefully I haven’t been shot by some wingnut at the polling station.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.