On the scapegoating of ballot dropboxes
"All In with Chris Hayes" podcast episode: "The GOP is quietly ‘Trump-proofing’ our system behind his back" (Dec 16, 2022) — In the last three minutes of the podcast, there's a question about the Republicans' attempt to ban dropboxes that receive ballots.
Marc Elias (elections lawyer): "The one that is the biggest puzzle to me is the dropboxes. Because honestly, I'm not aware of any partisan valence to the dropboxes. I don't know that it helps the Democrats or hurts the Democrats or helps the Republicans — "
Chris Hayes (podcast host): "Who cares?!"
Marc Elias: "It's a weird obsession, though, Chris. It's just weird that they keep trying to ban secure metal containers."
Chris Hayes: "Yes, right, as if, I want to be like — It can't hurt you. It's just a box. It's a box of metal, and people are going to put their votes in there. ...obviously, there's a long history in this country of voter suppression, right? Particularly along racial lines, right? There's that. But I also think it's [the attempt to ban dropboxes is] playing a weird kind of ideological role right now, which is a means of avoiding the hard truths about the more basic stuff that happens in elections — which is, like, did you run good candidates and did you have a good message? If it's the metal boxes' fault, then you don't have to talk about that."
Marc Elias: "That's exactly right. I mean, one of the things that has happened is that, rather than confront bad candidates, bad issue set, bad campaigns, they have demonized voting. Which is an odd thing to do, if you're trying to win elections. But they've demonized it and then they bring these ridiculous post-election challenges like we're seeing in Arizona, sort of as part of the further 'theater of losing,' so that they can further their grievance as to what happened."
You may be interested: "What’s the Final Message of the January 6 Committee?". Written on Sept. 28, 2022, it's a 5-minute read on Medium.
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