If you subscribe to the idea that Trump wants to intimidate legal immigrants who are eligible to vote and deter them from voting, I am not sure that Trump critics running around contending "ICE will be at the polls! Cops will be harassing people! Trump will use the National Guard to seize the ballot boxes!" is hindering his desired outcome or making it more likely.

It is extremely safe to vote. I understand that in a post-January 6 world, a lot of things that once seemed unthinkable are now thinkable. But no one who is legally eligible to vote should feel any concern about going to a polling place during the early voting period, or on Election Day, and you should feel confident that your ballot will be counted. With that said, I have my doubts about wisdom of localities using drop boxes; back in 2024, unknown assailants torched drop boxes in Washington and Oregon. In Oregon, things turned out okay; “fire suppressant inside the ballot box protected virtually all the ballots. Only three ballots suffered damage, and [Multnomah County Elections Division] will contact those three voters, via unique identifiers on their ballot envelopes, so they can receive replacement ballots.” But in Clark County, Wash., it was a different story; while authorities could identify 488 damaged ballots retrieved from the ballot box, “Elections personnel were unable to identify 6 of the ballots. Other ballots may have been completely burned to ash, and therefore, unidentifiable.” This year, before the California primary, Los Angeles election officials discovered a small number of vote-by-mail ballots with fire damage in a drop box near the Civic Center. So far, there have been no reports of attempted arson at drop boxes in the run-up to the general election. At minimum, local governments ought to locate ballot drop boxes in secure locations, such as inside a government building that gets locked up at night.

The Phantom Voter Intimidation Threat nationalreview.com/the-morni…