My advice: Act as if absentee/mail-in voting won't be an option

[Algernon Moncrieff]

If early voting is an option in your district, do that instead.

Consider putting in for a day off on election day now. It's hard for the boss to object this far out.

If you take election day off, go to the polls as early as you can. Once you've voted, help others get to the polls.

Keep an eye on your polling place location. Switching polling places to cause confusion is a common tactic. The internet can be your friend.

Go to the internet now and read up on your state's voter ID law. Make sure your State ID, Drivers License, Passport, and Voter's Reg are up-to-date and ready to go.

Remember that the "ProFa" forces of Donald Trump may not gracefully concede defeat. To the degree possible in these difficult times, get your financial house in order. Remember that you do still have Second Amendment rights (as our crazy uncles have all reminded us). Don't dismiss that option out of hand - you may need to defend your life before this is all over.

After seeing Portland, don't believe for a moment we aren't at this point:

Draped in lush trees and surrounded by stately buildings, Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo might look like a place to check out monuments or stop for a relaxing rest. But each Thursday, one of Argentina’s most famous public squares fills with women wearing white scarves and holding signs covered with names.

They are the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and they are there to bring attention to something that threw their lives into tragedy and chaos during the 1970s: the kidnapping of their children and grandchildren by Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship.

For decades, the women have been advocating for answers about what happened to their loved ones. It’s a question shared by the families of up to 30,000 people “disappeared” by the state during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” a period during which the country’s military dictatorship turned against its own people.

LINK

If you are into prayer, pray that our nation survives this moment intact. Pray that DUers don't end up arrested out of hand. Pray for our opponents - pray that they realize that even though we disagree, secret police are the way of the Nazis that our grandfathers fought, not the way of Americans.

[Thekaspervote]

1. I think that is excellent advice..just show up and vote!

[madaboutharry]

2. I think your post is a bit alarmist.

Trump is a cruel and twisted man, but I do not believe he is planning on creating an American version of a South American junta. I don’t think people need weapons to defend the country against our own government. Trump is going to get voted out of office and the new president will be sworn into office in January. The American people and the rest of the globe will demand it. It doesn’t matter what Trump says or does. I am with Nancy Pelosi on this.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

3. Really?

I just watched Ken Cuccinelli on Nightline spew bullshit about how unidentified federal agents in military uniforms were justified in plucking protestors from an American street because they had vague intelligence a federal building was threatened.

LINK

President Trump once again criticized Chicago and its violence on Monday, saying the city is "worse than Afghanistan" or any war zone that the U.S. is in, according to Forbes.

He made the comments during a law enforcement roundtable at the White House where the president made his clear opposition to defunding police and attacked Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for supporting police reform.

The president also condemned cities that are run by Democrats and “radical libs,” claiming that they are racked with violent crime and overrun with protesters who “rip everything down in front of them," according to Forbes.

LINK

And there is this...

But, of course, this is not any other moment. The Times has tracked hundreds of insults that Trump has already made since entering public life. He has called his critics “dogs,” “losers,” and “enemies of the people”; praised racists and trafficked in casual misogyny; derided people from nations he calls “shithole countries”; and labelled American cities where he is unpopular as rat-infested hellholes. This is not even the first time that Trump has used the word “scum”; in June, 2018, he referred to the lead F.B.I. officials who had investigated him as the “scum on top” of the agency. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that, with such a record, his Never Trumper tweet was not treated as major news (although a Republican House member from Illinois, Adam Kinzinger, did say on CNN that it was “beneath the office of the Presidency”). Arguably, the tweet was not even his most offensive and inflammatory of the week, a distinction that might belong to Trump’s self-pitying, racially charged, and willfully ahistorical lament, from Tuesday, that the impeachment proceedings against him in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives amounted to “a lynching.” In some ways, these Trumpisms have become so abhorrent—and frequent—that it may be easier to ignore them than to contemplate them.

Still, the President’s “human scum” tweet bears noting. First of all, it is quite simply the language of tyrants and those who aspire to be tyrants. Hitler called his enemies human scum, and so did Stalin. In recent years, the Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as “the Trump of South America,” denounced refugees as “the scum of humanity,” and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, denounced Sergei Skripal, the former spy recently poisoned by Russian agents, in Britain, as a disloyal “scumbag.” The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump says he has a “love affair,” executed his uncle after a show trial in which he was called “despicable human scum . . . worse than a dog.” Kim’s regime, it should be noted, also called Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, who differed with the President on the subject of North Korea, a “bloodsucker” and “human scum.”

LINK

I hope you are correct. I hope I'm being alarmist and this is just something that looks far worse than it is. But what I see is a failed President desperate to hold power and desperate to demonize those who differ from him - not just politically, but those who differ racially, financially, or spiritually.

[madaboutharry]

8. I am not saying that there is not a reason to be concerned.

I agree that Trump has crossed over into a very dark place. However, I do believe that the institutions of our democracy will hold. It might indeed get very ugly, but at the end of the day Trump will fail. He is too weak and broken to pull off destroying the Constitution and American democracy. There are too many who oppose him.

[uponit7771]

12. There's a technical crack in the constitution and its related to time; the court systems can sit on

... cases while a bastard like Trump impedes elections that could get rid of him.

The federal court systems have no obligation to hear cases immediately that involve Trump sending in troops to stand in the way of people voting for instance in Urban areas.

Trump ... WOULD ... do this to win but there's

[Algernon Moncrieff]

15. I sincerely hope you are right and I am wrong.

Portland was a big step over the line for me.

[madaboutharry]

17. Well see what America is made of.

I refuse to believe that a low life degenerate like Trump is going to be the reason we lose our country. We are a strong people and I believe we will come out on the other side of this horror.

[DSandra]

4. Given Trump's track record, being alarmist is being safe n/t

[uponit7771]

11. +1, the person who enacts policies to take children from asylum seeking parents & wish's people who

... work with pedophiles well should never be given the benefit of the doubt.

[uponit7771]

10. Why give Trump the benefit of any doubt on anything? Why now? After all this ?! thx in advance

[Hekate]

5. We're in California & have been voting by mail for some years. Currently, we drive a few miles...

...to the drop-box at the County Courthouse, and deposit our ballots there. That’s just us, locally, in a city of only 100,000, in a not-too-large county. I was dismayed beyond words at the problems exhibited in Los Angeles during the 2018 election — it really was a wtf situation, no excuses.

I think your post is timely. Not everyone has a car, or access to good public transportation, and gods know the New Jim Crow Laws are going to make it hell in some parts of the country. Be prepared.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

16. None of this "should" be a problem

That's why people should start planning now. There is still plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done 3+ months out.

[Wounded Bear]

6. VBM state here, I encourage all who can to vote by mail...nt

[Sherman A1]

7. Just did for our August state primary

And will do so again for the November election.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

14. I agree we should be able to do that.

Consider the very real possibility of USPS shutting down. Have a backup plan.

[uponit7771]

9. K&R, "After seeing Portland,..." this says it all. We should prepare for the worst

[Algernon Moncrieff]

13. Prepare now and be ready for anything

Should we all be able to vote by mail? Yes. Will we be able to? Don't bet your vote on it. Should we all be able to go vote without our license and a water bill? We should. But we need this time to do whatever it takes.

Vote like this might be your last chance for a while.