Election Day is Just the Beginning

HEa week agoIn the middle of early voting, an arsonist attached incendiary devices to two ballot boxes, one in Oregon and the other in Washington State. Hundreds of ballot papers were burned or burned beyond recognition. Affected voters will need to be identified, contacted and asked to resubmit their ballots. Police we are still looking for the criminal they fear might attack again.

Forget the hype about saving democracy; this one real The vote is being attacked and officials are preparing for even more. Election experts and local leaders predict this week, and possibly several weeks after, will see increased election-related disinformation, online threats and personal tensions that could escalate into violence.

In response, authorities across the country have turned scheduling centers into fortresses, with rolls of barbed wire atop their fences and ballistic films reinforcing their windows. Election officials conduct drills with law enforcement, work on nonviolent de-escalation tactics and learn protocols for encounters packages containing mysterious white powder.

But the more pressing concern is what will happen after On Tuesday, election workers were filled with impatience between counting the votes and certifying the results. Very few events will occur during this interval, which may last only hours or up to days in some places. real news and some attempts to create: Just when an attentive press becomes desperate for new developments, conspiracy theorists and allies of Donald Trump will be intent on sowing chaos and doubt.

“This is going to be a dramatic period,” Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in governance, told me. There are always small, human-caused errors in polls, but there have been only a few cases of voter fraud in decades of American elections. ever found. Any disruptions “are likely to escalate significantly this time, and people will take isolated examples and turn them into system-wide problems that could fuel anger,” West said. But instead of a day of intensified “Stop the Steal” violence like the one in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, West and other experts say we’ll likely see a more dispersed, harder-to-track election rejection movement. “Violence, if it occurs, will happen during the vote counting process,” he said.

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A.America has We have four years to prepare legally and logistically for this election week. Election officials received new training in case of chaos at polling places. Many states have passed laws to clarify the role of poll watchers, who could provide valuable transparency but were recruited by election conspirators to disrupt the 2020 election. it may happen again.

Authorities also strengthened their facilities. In Phoenix, the Maricopa County Counting and Election Center, ground zero for protests and many baseless allegations of fraud in 2020, is now surrounded by concrete barriers, armed officers and 24/7 video feed for public observation. JP Martin, a spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, said the county has also “developed robust cybersecurity measures” and employs on-call experts. “tiger teams”To troubleshoot any technology and security issues.

At the federal level, the Justice Department’s Election Threats Working Group has already filed 20 criminal charges against individuals accused of threatening election officials. Each of the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country has assigned a county election official to handle Election Day complaints. Yet officials in many states—Texas, GeorgiaAnd North Carolinathey purchased panic buttons for poll workers, to name just a few; some have it Narcan They have it in case they find fentanyl on their ballots. “Election officials are risk managers by nature” and are always aware of Election Day threats, Kim Wyman, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Washington secretary of state, told me. “What is new since 2020 is the more personal nature of these threats.”

While police officers won’t be deployed at every polling place in America this year, the presence of law enforcement, including plainclothes officers, will be higher than usual, even if their presence is deliberately inconspicuous. Safe and Secure Elections, a coalition of election and law enforcement officials, told me. “Police at polling places should be like fire extinguishers,” he said: approachable but not obtrusive.

Harvey and his colleagues spent the past year conducting “tabletop exercises” in states across the country. In these trainings, election officials and police collaborate to work through alarming scenarios, such as bomb threats to a polling place, reports of active shooters, and what exactly should happen if a group of armed men storm outside a polling place in a state. with open carry laws. “We allowed both sides to voice their concerns: what election officials want cops to do, cops telling election officials what they can do,” Harvey said. “At least they know each other.”

Harvey said most law enforcement participants seemed bored when he first started this project, but in the last six months “interest has increased dramatically.” Officials are aware that this election season could be more volatile than any recent one. “People have been marinated in conspiracy theories for four years,” Harvey said. So when they go to vote, “they will be ready for any kind of confrontation or anything they see as suspicious or evidence of fraud.” Before 2020, police officers often assumed most of the hard work was done when the polls closed. Harvey said they are now aware that when the polls close on Election Day, “this may be just the beginning.”

This brings us to the assumption that experts believe is more realistic than Election Day violence: a breakdown of public order resulting from days of confusion and impatience. Consider the hordes of people across America rioting outside polling stations and pursuing or physically attacking election officials. Imagine if 2020 would be even worse, experts say.

Trump’s supporters You don’t look prepared at all accepting a loss. And any allegations that the election was stolen this year could prompt them to take matters into their own hands. In 2020, the cities are as follows: Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, PhoenixAnd of Atlanta has seen hordes of angry people outraged by false claims of voter fraud. These are the places where election officials have received intense threats to date.

Delays will make things worse. Most states allow election officials to begin early voting before Election Day, which helps speed up the counting process. Unfortunately, there are still two states don’t let This is Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both decisive electoral battlegrounds. Results are also expected to take some time in key states like Georgia and North Carolina. Counting, checking, telling — “all of these things will draw crowds and have a frightening effect on poll workers,” Harvey said.

Take Pennsylvania, a must-win state for both Kamala Harris and Trump. “We could be facing a situation where early charts show Trump ahead and from Wednesday to Friday (that lead) starts to shift,” West said. “This is a bad formula for people who don’t trust the system.” Embers re-lined He wanted his supporters to pay special attention to Philadelphia. West said the city “will be the epicenter of a lot of anger” if Harris appears to be leading.

Philly leaders know this. Since 2020 they have moved the entire central election operation from the city center to the northeastern part of the city. Certified poll watchers are still allowed inside and there will be designated demonstration areas outside. But the new facility is also protected by fencing, barbed wire and security checkpoints. “Together with our law enforcement partners throughout the city, we are prepared for whatever may come our way,” city commissioner Lisa Deeley told me. Other states also say they are prepared for any eventuality. Officials in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada confirmed to me in emailed statements that they were increasing security measures to protect the count. “We need to be vigilant against the agitators out there,” Darryl Woods, chairman of the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners, told me. “Stupidity will not be tolerated.”

No one seems too worried about DC this year. The Department of Homeland Security has designated January 6, 2025, as a National Special Security Event, and D.C. police have held press conferences assuring citizens that they are prepared to alert law enforcement to any election-related irregularities before or on that date. Some experts told me that the days when the potential for risk is higher this time around are Dec. 11, the deadline by which states must certify election results, and Dec. 17, when voters gather in their states to vote for president. West said that if the elections are close, there may be protests and violence in the states where the difference is narrowest on both days.

One welcome reassurance is that experts are not predicting the kind of paramilitary mobilization America saw in 2020, when unrest over the police killing of George Floyd and COVID-19 lockdowns saw people marching in the streets and extremist groups fanning out. country. Prominent members of militia-style organizations such as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who rose to national prominence in 2020: thank god inside prisonMary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Georgetown, told me that many groups are refocusing their efforts at the local level.

Still, McCord is monitoring parts of the country where these militias have regrouped; These regions overlap with parts of the country, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Oregon, where in some cases experienced election officials have been replaced by election deniers. and Arizona. If there are any moves towards implementation after the election theory of independent state legislature “You can imagine the extremists coveting this,” McCord said.

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Khateful intimidation Violence may occur in the coming weeks, with election workers and volunteers feeling it the most. Many have been receiving threats for years and continue to forward them to local authorities through muscle memory. Paradoxically, the election officials most likely to face hostile pressure from MAGA activists are themselves Republicans.

Maricopa County Republican recorder Stephen Richer faces immense pressure and humiliation threats In 2020. But it also happened Leslie HoffmanA Republican in deep-red Yavapai County. So it happened Anne DoverHe’s the elections director for Cherokee County, Georgia, which voted for Trump. And so it happened Tina bartonA Republican clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, accused of cheating to help Joe Biden, received a voicemail promising “10,000 patriots” would find and kill him. No evidence of fraud was found in any of these counties. (Menacing “patriot” identified, charged and later convicted punishable by imprisonment for up to 14 months.)

This year, despite everything, some of the same officials remain quite hopeful. “While I have concerns and worries about what we might see in the next few days and weeks, maybe even a few months, I have to think this: The good of humanity and the good of America will ultimately win out,” said Barton, who now works for the nonpartisan Election Caucus.