My headspace

[luscious_purple]

My next feature article is due four weeks (28 days) from today. I will be spending nine of those days basically incommunicado in my work as an election judge.

(Note to people outside Maryland: "Election judge" is the fancy term this state uses for people who are paid a stipend to run the polling places. No law degree is necessary.)

Working as an election judge means working at least from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with precious little time available for going online via phone. Toss in a nearly hour-long round-trip commute on the eight days that are early voting, and that's a long time to be away from my computer. (The early-voting site is only 8.2 miles from my house, but the drive is entirely over surface streets with lots of stoplights.)

Whatever I have, which isn't that much, I'm going to print out and bring with me, so that I can at least look at it subtly when I am not serving people directly (we're not supposed to sit there using our electronic devices).

Speaking of the election ... I am so incredibly nervous and stressed out over the possibility of an Orange Poopyhead victory. I have NO FREAKING IDEA how anyone could support someone so narcissistic and mentally unstable. I have NO FREAKING IDEA how the polls can be TIED, balanced on a knife's edge, however you want to describe it. Now, I read on some Substack page (linked from Facebook) that Republican-oriented pollsters are "flooding the zone" with results showing tRump surging ahead to make their later challenges to Harris victories seem more legitimate, but I can't find that Substack again. I am really hoping for millions of "shy Harris voters," but after 2016, I am scared shitless. Honestly, I don't think I will feel at ease about the election until I see Vice President Harris put her left hand on a Bible and raise her right hand.

I don't put anything past the tRump authoritarians. Heck, if I wasn't in one of the most Democratic congressional districts in the entire nation, I probably wouldn't work as an election judge. With my unusual name, I am just too easy to find online. I don't want to spend the rest of my life (such as it is) dodging death threats, doxxers, swatters, and who knows what else.

Comments

[ursulas_alcove]

I'm with you there. I am afraid of civil unrest as I live in a mixed neighborhood. Our ballots are getting handed to a postal employee. I count it a win that one GOP neighbor has gone with a WuTang Forever sign this year. They woke up and smelled the shit. Best of luck to you. It's a hard job.

[luscious_purple]

My county gave less than 10 percent of its vote to the Orange One in the last two elections. Here the GOP is so weak, it doesn't provide candidates for most of the local offices.

That said, to reach DC by land, travelers have to pass through here or one of the other blue suburbs.

Also, about 1/5 of county residents identify as Hispanic/Latino. I have no idea how many have documents and how many don't. But if a future GOP administration wanted to "prove something" about "rounding up the illegals" and deporting them en masse, without the bad optics of crops rotting in the fields, said administration might pick someplace convenient to the huge DC media market.

P.S. No human is "illegal," of course.

[cz_unit]

I was raised to believe that America was somehow exceptional and we deserved good things because deep down we were good.

Maybe we're not.....