You Don’t Do This To Your Troops
Trump is using another ‘caravan’ moving north as a scare tactic for the election. Part of his plan involves sending the military to the border. He thinks that sending troops to the border will somehow convince people that a few thousand people from Central America going to the US border to seek asylum is an existential threat.
What he has done is take members of the military away from their families for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and stick them in tent cities. Those tents could be used for the 11,000 personnel displaced at Tyndall AFB by Hurricane Michael, but the “Commander-in-Chief” would rather use them for political theater. This involves thousands of voting age and eligible people having their service abused. It is the sort of disrespect that people don’t forget.
2 comments
I am unsure about elections in the USA regarding deployed Military personnel, especially given that voting in the USA is voluntary. But here if one is deployed during an election, Military personnel can register their vote to be mailed in by their command at the appropriate time.
How does it work in the USA? And what is the expectation that deployed personnel will bother anyway?
Troops vote at higher rates than regular citizens, but a deployment this close to the election will screw things up. Many people will vote at their “permanent address” [usually their parents’ address when they enter the service] by absentee ballot. They are probably OK. The troops that choose to register and vote locally may have a problem getting an absentee ballot or getting to an early voting location. Usually it is the more senior people who are setting down roots who vote locally, and they tend to be Republicans, which someone in the Republican Party should be aware of.