This is something I worry about with mail-in ballots.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/19/voter-intimidation-republicans-democrats-midterm-elections
Rebecca Solnit
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There’s a form of voter intimidation that widespread and unacknowledged. It’s the husbands who bully and silence and control their wives, as witnessed by dozens of door-to-door canvassers across the country I heard from.
I started asking around and found that a lot of get-out-the-vote ground troops had witnessed various forms of such bullying, intimidation and silencing in relation to this election and in earlier elections, too.
Wives asked their husbands directly who the two were going to vote for. Many seemed cowed. Husbands answered the door and refused to let the wife speak to canvassers, or talked or shouted over her, or insisted that she was going to vote Republican even though she was a registered Democrat, or insisted there were no Democrats in the house because she had never told him she was one. A friend in Iowa told me, “I asked the woman who answered the door if she had a plan for voting, and a man appeared, behind her, and said, quite brusquely, ‘I’m a Republican’. Before I could reply, he shut the door in my face.”
Another friend reported, “A woman I texted in Michigan told me, ‘I am not allowed’ to vote for the candidate.” Many canvassers told me those experiences were common. I did not find stories of the reverse phenomenon – wives dominating their husbands, or husbands pushing their wives to vote for the Democratic candidate. Of course I talked to people canvassing for Democrats, and domestic violence takes place across the political spectrum, but the bullying seemed to be mostly either to oblige the wife to lean to the right or to not participate at all.
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My friend Melody had a Nevada man who never turned off his leaf-blower roar at her over the din, “This is a RED house! This house is Republican!”
Melody told me: “I say I’ve come by to speak to Donna. ‘No, she doesn’t want to speak to you.’ I consider saying, ‘Looks like this house is kind of purple, since Donna is a Democrat.’ But then I think, ‘Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe she just goes into that booth and votes the way she wants without telling him.’ But what if she doesn’t go into a booth? What if they vote at the kitchen table? Does he supervise her ballot? Is she afraid to fill it out according to her own wishes rather than his?”
No one knows to what extent this domination may prevent women from voting according to their own beliefs and agendas or participating at all.
Of course there are plenty of rightwing women who are enthusiastically voting for the conservative of their choice, but when you look at the enormous gender gaps between Democrats and Republicans or hear the myriad door-to-door stories, you recognize that there are many marriages between Democratic women and Republican men, and many Republican men who intend to control their wives’ political expression.
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