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“Electoral Authoritarianism”: Should Elections Control the Government or Should Government Control Elections?

From Putin’s Russia to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, dictators have learned that you don’t have to cancel elections to steal democracy: you just have to terrorize the people who run them...

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Thom Hartmann
Oct 29, 2026
Image by kp yamu Jayanath from Pixabay

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Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next week they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.

They all know that federal law has made it a crime for federal law enforcement officers to enter polling places armed (unless there’s an active crime, like a shooting, going on), and has been since 1865, which has them particularly worried about their own possible legal exposure.

Several also noted that what makes this concern particularly cogent and urgent is that they’ve already watched Trump’s and Blanche’s Justice Department use invented claims of “irregularities” to get a judge to sign a warrant that allowed them to march armed agents into Georgia election offices on national television with little blowback and no consequences.

One former senior agent told the reporters how the Bureau used to handle this:

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