Jeffrey Kasky — a Florida lawyer who signed up to serve as a poll worker during early in-person voting and on Election Day — reveals in a new article for Florida’s Sun-Sentinel that he and his fellow poll workers were “threatened, harassed, taunted, harangued and even physically assaulted” by Trump supporters while serving on the job. At one point, he says, Trump supporters even began chanting the n-word at a Black woman who was serving as supervisor of the polling place — and on top of this travesty, Kasky says that a “deranged Trump supporter attacked that same supervisor with an umbrella, injuring her forehead.” In his characterization, Kasky describes the president’s supporters as cult members.
Overall, Kasky explains that the president’s backers who were on-site at his polling place behaved as if at “a college football tailgate party, complete with their own sound systems blasting the music of artists who most definitely do not share their political and social views.” This behavior had consequences, proving disrupting to the operations of the polling place. The Trump supporters who were present “blocked access in and out of our polling place with their vehicles, interfered with traffic by standing in the streets and waiving flags, and directly interfered with voters in the precinct by blasting the train horns from their jacked-up trucks directly into the polling place where voters were voting,” Kasky says.
Kasky notes that there’s no way to know for sure whether any voters gave up in the face of the Trump supporters’ obnoxious belligerence, but this de facto voter suppression was possible. The Trump supporters on-site were clearly rather unhinged — Kasky even says that a “man decorated head-to-toe with cheap Trump memorabilia” repeatedly “poked” him in the chest, as if trying to taunt and/ or physically intimidate him. Kasky says that police were called over the “terroristic” actions of the Trump supporters on a slew of occasions, but the officers rarely seemed to take the crisis seriously, leaving the poll workers to deal with the chaos almost on their own.
Kasky said that “Trump supporters are members of a cult, whether they realize it or not,” and he added that “[today], they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Trump supporters have kept up the obnoxious and dangerously disruptive behavior in the aftermath of Election Day. In Detroit, Trump supporters turned out to the premises of local ballot-counting operations, where they banged on windows like unhinged maniacs and furiously demanded to be let inside. They chanted demands to “stop the count.” Trump supporters also turned out to the premises of ballot-counting operations in Arizona — but there, they had the opposite perspective, chanting to “count the votes,” which is, of course, exactly what election workers on the premises were already planning on doing. As of the time of the Arizona protests, Trump was running a thin margin behind Biden in the state.
Trump has fueled the conspiracy theories about ballot-counting processes. He has claimed that local election authorities are conspiratorially rigging the count against him through means like including invalid votes, which is totally false.
