I love to vote. I have voted in every election, including off-off year school board elections. And I have been an early voter since it became a possibility. Yet despite its liberal reputation, California’s early vote arrangements are atrocious and I am a vote by mailer now.

So today I drove myself to the local post office and put my ballot in the mail receptacle inside the lobby, as I have since the pandemic began.

No muss. No fuss.

Not so in my state’s immediate neighbor to the east. In Arizona, specifically Maricopa County (home of the Cyber Ninja “forensic audit”), there are armed, masked and bullet-proof vested individuals making sure that the right sorts of people are voting, as they record videos of voters inserting their supposedly secret ballots into official ballot drop boxes. They also video the license plates of vehicles that the voters arrive in.

So if you were curious what voting in a police state was going to be like if TFG has his way, look no further than Maricopa County, Arizona.