I just don’t see how anyone can see this as intimidation when we still have anonymous voting. If I got this in a paycheck I would give off a hearty laugh at his futility before chucking it. If he wants to continue having a company and make money, he needs employees. Anyone intimidated by this isn’t using their noggin.
And pointing out that there is a relationship between who is in charge politically and economic conditions that affect employment should not exactly be a controversial or “intimidating” position. Barring direct questioning or an actual vote-leveraging scheme about one’s vote my employer pointing out this link has no more intimidating force than… literally any other random citizen pointing it out.
The worst I would accuse them of is abusing the attention of a captive audience.
You don’t see how a guy who has flushed over half a million dollars down the Turmp campaign shitter can’t buy himself a few poll workers (or at least make it seem credible)? Really?
Wait, are you saying you think he’s going to buy off poll workers to tell him who his employees voted for?
I mean yeah that’s bad and illegal. And IMO extremely unlikely. How would he even know where or how his employees are voting? He’s going to match employee addresses with polling places and… I mean whatever, it’s starting to sound like a bad movie in which a wanna-be gets in over his head. That would be a whole different ball of wax from a note that points out that there is a relationship between the office of the president and economic policy.
I mean my union helpfully points out that it’s against my economic interest to vote against candidates supporting eternal copyright and no one calls that intimidation, because it’s not.
Have you been missing the months long campaign to actively create voter intimidation by the Trump campaign? Do you think they were kidding? Or that that is normal and fully legally campaign behavior?
And your union isn’t threatening to fire you if you vote the wrong way. Apples and oranges.
That’s not fiction. In the bad old days, it was fact. It is exactly what bosses would do. There’s a reason why these laws are necessary.
And ultimately, whether he bribes some poll workers or hints that he has, it’s the same effect, which is to control how or whether his employees vote. It just has to be feasible that he would for the intimidation to work.
I live in a county where one party (the GOP) was in control until 2016. That party dominated all local politics since the Civil War. When I moved here, my neighbors told me how party leaders would learn about their families, encourage employees to have everyone in the family vote the same way, and make sure they registered their kids when they came of age.
All they need to see is that you’ve registered differently, and that makes you a target. All they have to do is count the votes in a municipality and follow up on the ones they didn’t get to figure out how many crossed party lines. That was before voting machine insecurity was even a thing.
You could laugh off a note like this, but in that kind of environment the ones that aren’t in line are reported by the ones who are following the plan. They talk a lot about protecting people’s freedoms and rights, but their actions prove they only want control. They don’t really care about legal or illegal, just about getting what they want (power) and keeping it.
This is all anyone needs to know about the mentality of ownership/upper management at this place.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they have El Rushbo, etc. on the PA all day.
Damned if I would want to work there.
It is amusing to see these yahoos crying about job-losses that might occur under Biden, while they cheerfully ignore the losses that have occured under Lord Dampnut’s mal-administration. Similarly, some of the political ads for republicans show scenes of riots & mayhem, while implying that Biden wants more of the same… and ignore the fact that these things are already happening.
In any case, this is intimidation, although maybe not in a strictly legal sense. At least this scumbag of an employer doesn’t have access to employee voting records.
Oh absolutely. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a law, just that people should be better judges of actual power. Unless someone has a way of seeing my vote, they have no power. If I thought this was a True Threat and not just ignorant riffing on economics I would mail in my ballot. Ballot is covered, then it goes in the box. Anything else happens, then yes we have a severe problem. I don’t see current intimidation and voter suppression efforts crossing that line. Fixing individuals’ votes is just too burdensome and easier to bust compared to simply dumping ballots from precincts suspected to vote “incorrectly”.
Incidentally this is also why I’m hugely in favor of anti-ballot-box selfie publishing laws. The negatives are simply blown out of the water by avoiding voter bribery/intimidation.
To the self-employed this is a distinction without a difference. If you rely on recording income, they are saying exactly the same thing- you will suffer economic hardship if you vote wrong. Weighing being fired vs. losing income is confusing quality with quantity. I’d say it’s more comparing apples to slightly smaller apples.
And this is where I’ll say if one is purposely registering one’s political preference with the state than who isn’t being sufficiently paranoid. (This is why primaries should be open or, perhaps more radically, it would be healthier to abolish political parties in their present form).
This guy has both the means and the motive to do so. I would argue he has the opportunity, too. So it’s a credible threat. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t make it impossible.
A poll worker was just fired because they were sneaking looks at ballots while in the part of the process where there was still identifying information on them. While such activities are very very likely to be detected and the person caught, if a douchbag like this owner throws enough money at the problem, some people won’t care if they are caught.
Not to mention, “if Biden gets elected, people get fired” is practically a distinction without a difference from “if you vote for Biden, I’ll fire you”. It’s easy enough to tell if someone in the office goes against the grain, and those are the folks who would be first to get a pink slip.
I’d put this in the pile though with the voter fraud and the skittles and all the other things that do happen and are possible to speculate nefarious plots, but are rare enough to not freak out over. This could be possible but so are a lot of things. He says he’s done this every election, is there evidence his professed attitude led to actual crimes in the past? If rich CEOs are in the habit of doing so, where are the past cases?
There is so much shitshows actually happening in voter suppression above level I don’t see the need to get hung up on conspiracy peddling “but he could”
I don’t know that anyone’s getting all hung up on this, but I do think there’s a very natural push back when we see stories like this or the uniformed, armed Miami cop with his tRump mask at the polling station and people mention intimidation and see responses of, “it’s not really intimidation,” because, how intimidated you feel by those things has a lot to do with your current station in life and relative power.
ETA: I’m not using any of these terms in the legal sense, IANAL.
Swing and a miss. The reason voter fraud is so rare is because of the likelihood of being caught. We can’t give this guy a pass, because he should get caught and punished to reduce the chance of others trying the same.
It’s not conspiracy peddling; this shit has been done before. It’s not the idiocy of a pedophile ring run out of the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor; it’s history that we should avoid repeating.
Hogwash. I, and I’m sure many other commenters here, would have the same thing to say if the note was reversed. If my employer put a note in my paycheck saying, “If you vote for Trump, you’ll likely be out of a job” then I would immediately report them to election officials.
It doesn’t fucking matter who or what they are in favor of or against, voter intimidation is wrong. Period, end of sentence.
