ICE at the polls? Ain’t never gonna happen, says this voting expert

At a press briefing on Friday, David Becker, a longtime voting rights advocate and the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a “fiercly nonpartisan” nonprofit, threw a bucket of ice water on fears that the Trump administration might send federal troops or ICE agents to polling places.

The administration hasn’t explicitly threatened such a thing, although neither Trump nor his officials, including former personal lawyer and DOJ chief Todd Blanche, have ruled it out. DHS chief Markwayne Mullin recently said federal officers could be deployed to polling places if there was “a threat” or they were “serving a warrant,” though he also said DHS had no plans for such a thing. Democratic officials, meanwhile, have made a stink about it and the City of Denver is sufficiently freaked out that it has sued the administration to stop any such deployment.

A reporter at the briefing asked Becker whether he knows of any plans afoot, and what might happen in the courts if something were to go down on Election Day?

Here’s Becker’s response in full, with just a few light edits:

“I want to be very clear: This is not going to happen. ICE and troops will not be at the polls, period.

There are many reasons for this. One, it is completely and obviously illegal—18 U.S.C. 592 blocks this. As soon as someone, an armed federal, as soon as a troop or an armed man—that is the term in the statute—”armed men.” As soon as there is an armed individual at a polling place, there will be a court action.

Jurisdictions are preparing for it. They won’t need to use this, but they will go. They will get it blocked. And I think the administration is, and probably should be, worried that there might be political backlash if it occurred.

But even more importantly, it is very hard to target particular voters for intimidation, thanks to what the states, both red and blue, have done with regard to “convenience” voting: 47 states offer early in-person voting of some sort. Three-fourths of the states offer mail voting without an excuse. Democrats are disproportionately taking advantage of those now because the president has so delegitimized [mail voting], falsely, that the Election Day in-person voting is now disproportionately Republican.

So, if you try to deploy troops in order to suppress voters, the most likely time people are voting would be Election Day, and you might inadvertently, if you’re a Republican president, suppress your own voters.

This is not going to happen. I can’t say this strongly enough.

Now, it may very well be that there are people within the administration, and perhaps even the president himself, who would desperately love voters to be fearful that it might happen, which is why I think you see them dancing around this issue. We saw this with with Attorney General Blanche during his confirmation hearings.

I think you know the chairman of the Joint Chiefs issued a statement that was very clear on this: that there will be no troops. It is illegal to put troops at the polls. That it will not happen. I understand, given the administration’s seemingly intentional vagueness on this, litigants might want to get the administration on the record to get clear indications before court that this is not going to happen.

But regardless of the status of this lawsuit, regardless of what you what what we might hear from the administration, it is not going to happen.”

You’re welcome.