there is so much to be hopeless and furious about, but holy shit, man, when you look at how many people have already cast their ballots despite the absolutely dystopian voting conditions imposed by Republicans, it’s hard not to feel awestruck and emotional about it.

“we took away every ballot drop-off site except for ONE in your ENTIRE county” “fuck you man, I’ll sit in this line of cars all day if I have to”

if Biden wins, there will never be a better moment to push for the most aggressive voting rights legislation the US has ever seen

there are a lot of people driving for miles, standing for hours, waiting endlessly on hold or filing multiple forms to fix mistakes, bearing all manner of inconvenience and frustration, to cast their vote because they understand how many other people WANT to do so but can’t.

Like I know we’re all scared and everything is fucked and nihilism feels safer than hope but also it’s legitimately so beautiful to see this?? not the long lines themselves, which are a grotesque marker of blatant and gleeful voter suppression, but the human beings in them

they absolutely are. many of those lines in the videos and images you’ve seen are in places where republicans have closed down dozens if not hundreds of poll dropoff sites statewide. no one should EVER have to wait in a line that long. it’s designed to encourage them to give up. https://twitter.com/leslietfj/status/1313975893535186947

there’s a lot of class privilege in the implication that everyone could just go away and come back later. you don’t know what work, childcare, financial or other life arrangements they had to make to get there. hourly wage workers can’t sit in a line all day long TWICE.

The point of having ballot dropboxes everywhere is so it can be a 5-minute errand you can do anytime. It makes it easier for people like hourly-wage workers and parents with young kids/no childcare to vote, and that’s why the GOP has been shutting them down en masse.

Oregon has been 100% mail-in voting my whole life. You can take your ballot to any public library, and there’s a massive list of other drop sites like schools, community centers, nonprofits, etc. This is so no one has to sit in line in their car or stand out in the rain all day.

So yes, as I said before, the enthusiasm and the commitment is incredibly inspiring. The people waiting in hours-long lines three weeks early to vote out Trump are everything great about America but the existence of the lines themselves is everything wrong with it.