David Graham

People may just not want to come to the polls if there are heavily armed people in the streets.

The answer you get from people on the MAGA right is, well, if you're a citizen, you have nothing to fear.

And I think as we've seen many arrests of citizens by ICE and including detention of citizens, that doesn't really hold water anymore.

But the other problem is inconvenience.

If you have heavy vehicles on the streets and checkpoints and lots of soldiers or guardsmen,

It makes it hard to get to election places.

And that inconvenience can keep people from voting, especially in the midterm where people are not as motivated or as energized as they are in a presidential election.

So all of these little bits on the margin can start chipping away at how many people are willing or able to cast their votes.

Heather Honey is one of these figures who rose to prominence in the aftermath of the 2020 election as a sort of self-styled election analyst.

And she was involved in efforts in some states to raise questions about whether there had been fraud.

As we know, there was no evidence of fraud.

All the legal cases that

concerned the 2020 election were defeated.

But Honey now has been appointed to this new position at DHS that concerns election integrity.

And we don't know exactly what her powers might be or how she might use them, in part because this position is new and because the administration has not told us a lot about it.

But I think if you put it alongside those other efforts to reduce the security in other ways, the worry is that she'll use that perch

to either pressure local officials to do things that reduce security or that are against the law, or else simply that she will cast doubt on the elections and create concerns among the electorate about whether elections have been fair.

This is a really good question, and it depends a little bit on the kinds of cases we see.

On the one hand, the Supreme Court has been taking a lot of steps on the shadow docket.

On the other hand, the courts tend to be reluctant to interfere with elections too close to the election.