Monday, August 15, 2016

Questions Of Protection

By Sniffles

Back in 2012, we cats signed up for poll-watching duty in Virginia. It meant we had to get up at 4 AM so we could be at our assigned precinct by 6 — and we ended up staying until close to midnight, because the staff had to run the numbers by hand to make them tally. With no cat naps! It was, to say the least, a challenging day.

But the most daunting thing about it was boning up on all those election laws. We're not lawyers — but we're cats, so we're pretty smart. But we still needed to attend training, and do some serious studying of the big fat book of rules and regs that we received before Election Day.

So we're curious: How is Donald Drumpf's "election observer" effort going? (Aside from John Oliver's very funny comment about whether Drumpf truly "knows what he is legally allowed to do.") A few questions come to mind:

Since Drumpf's key demographic is white men without college degrees (and the white women without college degrees who love them), how well are they going to navigate the complicated laws that occasionally baffled even us? Perhaps Drumpf will discover that loving "the poorly educated" has a price.

Will all the women lawyers who volunteered for Romney's voter protection campaign in 2012 show up for duty this year? With the huge gender gap that Drumpf's got going — and the fact that just today he called into question Hillary Clinton's "physical stamina" to be President — we wonder.

Finally, are Drumpf's overwhelmingly white election observers going to go into heavily black precincts in, say, Philadelphia, to make sure they aren't "voting 10 times"? Surely they'd be too chicken. But even if they did, what would they do — call a cop every time an African-American citizen goes to vote? Like with that very strange bathroom bill in North Carolina, we're having a hard time imagining enforcement. In the meantime, we cats PURR.

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