November 5, 2024

Photo: Elizabeth Bick

The Anderson County, South Carolina, elections office is located in an old bank building with nothing but glass in the front. “My fear is someone just dropping by and shooting the whole place up,” Laura Booth, the county’s elections director, tells me. Someone smashed through one of the big glass windows after hours this summer, not too long after two county vehicles were vandalized in the office parking lot. She’s been on high alert since. “Anytime someone walks in that has a book bag, or has a hoodie or a large jacket on, I start watching immediately,” she says.

It’s not like she hasn’t been threatened before. Weeks before the 2016 presidential election, a man stormed into Booth’s office and asked to file paperwork to run for president. She explained that the filing deadline had already passed. Then he pulled a knife from his pocket. “He just kept twirling it,” she remembers. “He didn’t hold it up to me, didn’t say I’m going to kill you. But the whole time he talked to me, he had a knife in his hand.” Her team called the police, who escorted the man out of the office and charged him with brandishing a weapon in a government building.

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

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If we're being honest this is the only celebrity "I voted" photo we want to see, since Rihanna can't. She has made her feelings on the subject clear, though. And check out some of the less generic "I voted" sticker designs out there. For counterprogramming, just open the no-election liveblog in a new tab and desperately hit refresh every ten minutes or so.

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