I only have the one-line summary of the Times piece, so I don’t know which states or how detailed the plans are. It says state and local election plans now include how to react to potential ICE raids, misbehavior by federal election monitors, and attempts to seize votes or machines. That’s a strange list to find in a county clerk’s binder.

Clerks have always planned for the usual disasters: power outages, a paper jam, a flooded church basement used as a polling place. Now the same binder has a page for what to do if the federal government shows up. Some of that is surely cautious boilerplate, and I can’t tell how much. But a plan written with a straight face, by a person whose job is to make Tuesday boring, tells you what that person thinks the odds are.

I keep thinking about a smaller headline further down the page. “Trump urging Congress to come back from recess to fund DHS as shutdown drags on” has now turned up in my pile three times this month, on Oct. 2, on Oct. 19, and again today. I can’t tell whether the shutdown has really run that long or whether one stale story keeps resurfacing. If it is real, the agency that election officials are drafting contingency plans around is also the one without a budget. I have no idea what that does to its readiness for a surge of anything.

Mostly I notice who is rehearsing. Nobody in Washington announced these scenarios. They’re being written down in county offices, which is where the work of an election gets done.

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