Sheriffs and Voting Security
Sheriffs and Voting
Donald Trump’s latest fixation is election “security.” Recently he told Fox News, regarding Election Day: “We're gonna have everything. We're gonna have sheriffs and we're gonna have law enforcement and we're going to have hopefully U.S. Attorneys.”
Those of you reading are likely to agree with me that if there is disorder, it will stem from the defunding of the U.S Postal Service, Republican state politicians who will not allow vote-by-mail (looking at you Ken Paxton), lazy or malfeasant election officials, and other forms of election interference. It hardly makes sense that sheriffs or other law enforcement officials will “fix” anything, and most legal experts point out that is it, on top of ludicrous, illegal.
The idea that Trump would deploy his loyal team of sheriffs would be funny if sheriffs haven’t played such a frighteningly horrific role in voter intimidation. In early America, sheriffs often certified election results and investigated voter fraud in addition to exerting political power on the county level. As part of their role in the “maintenance of white supremacy,” Southern sheriffs long used their office to intimidate Black voters by placing voting booths inside sheriffs’ offices, deploying armed deputies to “watch” people come to cast their ballots, and ignoring whites who thought Black people would vote “the right way” given the proper “incentive.” Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Alabama, carried a pistol, a cattle prod and a rope, which he used to chase 60s activists out of town and arrest local Black leaders. Recently, ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio threatened to use armed deputies to “watch” the polling places, chilling the vote of Latinx people, and off-duty sheriff deputies were used on election day in other states to patrol Black and Latinx communities as a pretext for harassment.
Sheriffs themselves are democratically elected and, of late, have used this to prop up Trump-like forms of populism rooted in white male dissatisfaction. This is a message the National Sheriff Association actively promotes this as a positive quality of the sheriff office, making them a “check and balance” on county, city and appointed policed chiefs (which, in contrast, are “political,” unlike sheriffs, according to the NSA). The Trump administration has wholeheartedly embraced the blurred lined between democratic accountability and populism. Speaking to the National Sheriffs Association, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions once said, “The independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elective process.”
I’ve written before about my concerns regarding populist-driven policing strategies and the tension between sheriffs as direct elected representatives and their autocratic tendencies – their long tenures, lack of direct accountability, and liberty to run their office however they wish. There are a significant number of sheriffs elected on their popularity with the deputy unions, which, in my view, links to the rise of dangerous, racist populism with only a bare, spectral resemblance to democracy in form only. I believe in democratic values but am deeply concerned about the rise of populism and the ways in which it masquerades as accountability or direct representation. Trump’s opening remarks at the Republican National Convention on Monday only confirm for me the ways in which his administration will weaponize the populism sheriffs have long embraced to oppress those who do not enjoy the same privileges and powers as those in his administration.
Other Reading
1) I have long admitted the work of Leah Sottile, and her latest for the New York Times Magazine (about the Boogaloo movement, which intersects with the Constitutional Sheriff movement) is no exception.
2) Los Angeles Tenant Union resists sheriff’s evictions. While the sheriff’s role is to enforce eviction orders, as far as I can tell, they have a great deal of discretion in how/ when/ whether to enforce them.