As I write this, polls are about to close in some states, and I am erratically vacillating between cautious, nauseous semi-optimism and a foggy, existential dread, which might also just be iron deficiency. (I'll check on that later.) Of course, all of this is par for the course for an election—a presidential election, no less—in the Trump era. And Tuesday marks a presidential election full of firsts: the first since the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade, the first with a woman of color at the top of a major party, and... the first since Donald Trump's Big Lie made pretty much every polling place in the country a potential target in the eyes of his most deranged supporters.
Speaking of the Big Lie, I have some good news and bad news on that front. The good news is that no one's gotten physically attacked or injured yet, and hopefully, no one will! The bad news is that there have been some threats of varying levels of credibility, which is sadly to be expected in a country where our former president lied to all his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from him by scheming, liberal election workers, and it may take force to win the country back.
Early Tuesday, two polling places in Georgia, a pivotal swing state, reported receiving bomb threats. By Tuesday afternoon, Georgia officials and the FBI said the threats came from Russia. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election," Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told USA Today. The FBI shared that polling places in several states received similar bomb threats, many of which “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” Meanwhile, CNN reports that polling places in Michigan also received these threats on Election Day, both appearing to stem from Russia, too.
Elsewhere in the country, a bomb squad arrived on the scene at a polling place in Jacksonville, Florida, early Tuesday afternoon to assess a suspicious package. Voters had to wait outside the premises for about 20 minutes, but authorities eventually gave the all-clear and normal operations resumed. Meanwhile, at the Capitol—which not so long ago was the gathering place of an enormous nightmare blunt rotation on Jan. 6, 2021—authorities arrested a greased-up man who was waving a torch and flare gun and "smelled like fuel." An investigation is reportedly underway, but I can't imagine the unnamed, grotesquely oily man was up to any good.
It remains unclear if any of these threats or potential threats came from Trump supporters, but what is perfectly clear is that Trump is largely responsible for sowing sometimes violent distrust of elections and election workers among his base. Threats to polling places and election workers aren't normal, or at the very least, they shouldn't be—yet, this is the reality we're dealing with in a post-Big Lie world. And, to be clear, the impact of these rising threats isn't gender-neutral: 80% of election workers are women, and women election workers say their gender leaves them more vulnerable to harassment in general.
So, that's where we're at: bomb threats, bomb squads, and a suspiciously greased-up dude at the U.S. Capitol—in other words, it's Election Day in America, baby!
