Bannon’s latest fever dream

I see where Mussolini wannabe Steve Bannon has been asserting that ICE should swarm election polling places, ostensibly to prevent non-citizens from voting.

“During Tuesday’s episode of his War Room podcast, Bannon outlined his vision, which, as I alluded to above, should not necessarily be taken as literal White House policy. But it mirrors concerns that Democratic officials have been sounding the alarm about for months. Bannon suggested that the administration should send in ICE agents to “surround the polls” in the upcoming midterms, supposedly as a means to prevent the election from being stolen. He also proposed invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in the Army to monitor election administration.

 

“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said. “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

 

“President Trump has to nationalize the election,” Bannon continued. “He has to put, not just, I think, ICE, but you’ve got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act. You’ve got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people are actually registered to vote, and people that are United States citizens vote in this election. Full stop. We will not accept anything less.”

LOL! There’s never been evidence for significant numbers of non-citizens voting. And no wonder—it’s illegal, and weighing the consequences of getting caught against the non-existent benefit of casting a single illegal vote, nobody would do it purposely. 

Beyond the fact that it’s a solution in search of a problem, there are about 90,000 polling places in the US. Even taking a minimum of three agents to “surround” each polling place, that’s 270,000 agents. There are currently around 22,000 ICE agents in the entire country. There are about 18,000 soldiers in the 101st and around 6500 in the 82nd. Even if you moved all these guys from their current stations to US voting booths, the numbers in Bannon’s cheap fiction simply don’t work.

Bannon, like Trump, is a doddering old gasbag. And unlike Trump, Bannon has no power, just a microphone. Ignore him.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/bannon-describes-vision-for-ice-at-polling-places-that-dems-have-been-warning-about

 

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