This Is What Donald Trump’s “Army” of Fascist Voter Intimidation Looks Like

A uniformed, fully armed police officer sporting was seen at a polling location in Miami Tuesday, wearing a face mask reading “TRUMP 2020” with the words “NO MORE BULLSHIT” underneath.

That is a violation on a number of levels. Campaigning is not allowed inside polling places or within a certain number of feet of their entrance. In Florida, that appears to be 100 feet. And yes, wearing clothing or accessories with a candidate’s name on them counts as campaigning. If you wear a shirt or mask with a candidate’s name or logo to the polls, you can be asked to remove it or turn it inside out.

While volunteering as a poll worker in 2016, I had to ask a woman waiting in line to turn her Hillary Clinton shirt inside out because another voter complained. I didn’t want to but those are the rules. And yet this man, Officer Ubeda, walked into his early voting site looking like this:

Ubeda’s actions are also a violation of his departmental orders, according to Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who called his behavior “inappropriate,” telling the Miami Herald, “a police officer is supposed to be impartial.”

“Irrespective of who the person was, whatever sign it would have been, it would’ve been problematic,” said Suarez.

And Ubeda’s own police force took to Twitter to do some damage control, writing that “this behavior is unacceptable” and that it is being “addressed,” though with no specifications as to how.

It’s not clear if Ubeda was there to vote or just to show off his mask, gun, and general love of fascism. It also doesn’t matter either way.

Even under normal circumstances, the Trump mask—or a mask advocating for any candidate—should not have been allowed inside the polling place worn on anyone. The added element of the officer’s uniform and gun adds an unsettling tinge of fascism. And what really takes this over the line into full-on disturbing and newsworthy behavior is that Trump has been amassing a self-described “army” of unauthorized “poll watchers,” who he’s been encouraging to try to illegally supervise voting locations and then tweeting about “corruption” when they’re turned away. With his heavily militarized language and hyper-partisan approach, what he is encouraging is not poll watching, it’s voter suppression.

A key element of all of this is that in the past, the GOP used to employ off-duty police officers with visible weapons and armbands to act as this same sort of “poll watcher,” stationed in predominantly POC districts. Democrats sued and the GOP hasn’t been allowed to do that for decades. But a judge very recently lifted the “consent decree” keeping them from doing so.

So it’s nice that the Miami PD tweeted about Ubeda’s “unacceptable” behavior but that behavior is also being encouraged by the president and the entire Republican Party.

(via Steve Simeonidis on Twitter, image: Scott Linnen on Twitter)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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