Designing an open 2020 setting

[Fred Brackin]

It occurred to me last night that "research" that might help would be to look at this as if it were a paranoid fantasy of 1972 as seen from 1968. This is really, really out there.

Other issues:
_How_ would the US military intervene in domestic politics? Especially how would the services with lots of important but inapplicable hardware like the USAF and the USN do it? The USAF can't threaten to send much in the way of troops into the streets.

I don't think that local politicians _can_ really interfere much in important court cases. I'm still not seeing why this can't be resolved in the courts. Supreme Court Justices are also notoriously unbeholden to whoever appoints them too.

Also as to vote fraud I have to point you towards the big cities. That's simply where the precincts are crowded and the system is stressed. Trying to do much of anything with Wyoming's single Congressional district is going to run into practical difficulties. It'd be hard to hide fake addresses for non-existent voters when there's nothing else around but tumbleweeds.

You might be able to have a scheme where one side makes the other side's big city voters disappear. The local politicians actually wouldn't try and interfere with investigating that but you might ascribe shenanigans to somebody of the other side in the State Capitol.

Maybe you can get by with just having the PCs not question the credibility of the setting. As I said a lot of this is really, really out there.