Every selection room manned by well-balanced people of the participating political parties, and by high ranked civil servants.

Details vary by state, but most polling places in the US have something resembling that standard.

That offers security against such election-theft techniques as ballot stuffing or excessive voter challenges. It’s less effective against armed maniacs, of which the US has far too many, and the Netherlands few or none.

I don’t expect it to be a problem at many polling places. But even one is too many, and I can’t be confident that it won’t happen anywhere.

‘course, there’s a lot of not voting.

Because there’s no choice. Rightwing or right wing. That’s maybe a third of people right there unsupported in political circles: the left.

http://www.juancole.com/2016/10/starstruck-fanatic-paradox.html

How can a Trump supporters wear shirts saying “Make America great again,” which implies America is currently not great, then tell critics of the GOP to leave the country if they don’t like it as is?

Military coups happen in rather specific circumstances. First, the distrust of established political institutions has to be off the charts. This is usually because of widespread corruption or dysfunction. I’m talking about countries where you basically expect to pat bribes, for example, to every single official you encounter. There is corruption in the US, but it’s nothing like that level.

Second, you need an army that sees itself as the guardian of the nation, in opposition to the major political actors like the legislature. In Turkey, for instance, the army sees itself as the protector of the secular nation, carrying on Kemal Ataturk’s vision. They don’t see the legislature as an equal player there. They’ve had coups before, too, in the 1990s. That simply isn’t the case in the US (not yet anyway).

Third, you need a core leadership in the Army/ military that would support a coup across the armed services. That’s not impossible, but in the US it’s harder to do. You basically would have to get the chiefs of staff to all agree.

I should add that right wing people love to talk about how a military coup wouldn’t work because of an armed populace. That assumes that the military power of the populace matters, and in most coups it doesn’t. It’s a non-factor. A coup by definition is a political matter, getting decided at high levels far from anything that an ordinary citizen ever sees.

If the army tried attacking polling places that would spark a lot of unrest that they would then have to deal with. ANd unrest doesn’t mean riots, necessarily. People simply might not cooperate, and by that I mean not do their jobs. Governments function because of all the paper-pushers coming into work and doing their jobs. If those paper pushers decide to just not do anything when they go into the office, or just say “screw it I am taking the day off” then the whole apparatus comes to a screeching halt. This is why in many coups, by the way, the attacks are on the civil services– people get fired and replaced with flunkies. So if you were to try and mount a military coup in the US, you’d also need the civil service workers at least tacitly on your side. There’s no evidence of that in the US.

None of this i s