Wow:
Authorities were investigating Monday after early morning fires were set in ballot drop boxes in Portland, Oregon, and in nearby Vancouver, Washington, where hundreds of ballots were destroyed.
The Portland Police Bureau reported that officers and firefighters responded to a fire in one ballot drop box at about 3:30 a.m. and determined an incendiary device had been placed inside. Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said a fire suppressant inside the drop box protected nearly all the ballots; only three were damaged, and his office planned to contact those voters to help them obtain replacement ballots.
A few hours later, across the Columbia River in Vancouver, television crews captured footage of smoke pouring out of a ballot box at a transit center. Vancouver is the biggest city in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country, between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent.
I think we can be pretty sure who might be responsible for this and it isn’t someone who is rooting for Gluesenkamp Perez since the drop box in Washington was in an area she won.
Most jurisdictions will let you check to make sure you ballot was received. I hope they are able to get in touch with every person registered in those dkstricts to let them know that they need to do that.
Let’s hope these acts of vandalism don’t catch on. But I’m afraid that this kind of election interference is probably going to be fairly common in one way or another. Election day could be a real circus in some places. They’re actually training their “poll watchers” to cause chaos.
And there have already been some incidents, encouraged by the Trump campaign:
A man in Texas who wore a MAGA hat to a 2024 presidential election early voting location was arrested after he punched an election worker who asked him to remove the hat. Jesse Lutzenberger, 63, was arrested Thursday and has been charged with injury to an elderly person, according to an incident report from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.
Twenty-one states prohibit the wearing of political or campaign apparel in or immediately around voting locations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures…
MAGA wants to wear their ugly cult regalia wherever they go. They don’t take kindly to being told there are rules against it, even for a minute.