ICE signs $16.7 million contract for gloves its own Army study found cause 'excessive' fear in test subjects.

…(cont) That was the preseason.

The Justice Department's civil rights chief told reporters she hopes to send a historic number of election monitors, a thousand of them, to polling sites next month; the NAACP sued her over it that same Wednesday. Democracy Forward, the same day, released a 166-page ICE document showing the agency's Homeland Security Investigations branch has gathered 50 million voter records and discussed sending undercover agents into nonprofits that register voters. And the Guardian published the Army's own study of the shock gloves ICE signed a $16.7 million contract in August to buy — 6,000 pairs, tested on military volunteers who, the study found, stopped fighting immediately and feared further exposure. The Guardian's own description of what the devices are built for: detainees and protesters.

All together now, line item by line item: no plan for the polls, and a thousand monitors headed there anyway. No targeting of voters, and fifty million of their records already on file. A government study warning the gloves induce "excessive" fear, and a contract signed on top of the warning.

Four pieces of paper and one campaign ad, inside the same week, describe one toolkit before anyone gave it a name: watch the voter, hold the voter's file, station someone at the voter's door, and carry along something built to make a person stop moving.

Nothing here required a conspiracy to read. It only required reading the filings in the order the clerks stamped them.