The Real Election Risk Comes Later

One week ago, in the middle of early voting, an arsonist attached incendiary devices to two ballot-drop boxes, one in Oregon and another in Washington State. Hundreds of ballots were scorched or burned beyond recognition. Affected voters will have to be identified, contacted, and asked to resubmit their ballot. Police are still searching for the culprit, who they fear may strike again.

Set aside the high-minded talk of saving democracy; this was a literal attack on voting—and officials are preparing for even more. Election experts and local leaders anticipate that this week, and probably some weeks after, will bring a torrent of election disinformation, online threats, and in-person tensions that could boil over into violence.

In response, officials across the country have transformed their tabulation centers into fortresses, with rolls of razor wire atop their fences and ballistic film reinforcing their windows. Election staffers are running drills with law-enforcement officers, studying nonviolent de-escalation tactics, and learning protocols for encountering packages containing mysterious white powder.

The more pressing concern, however, is what happens after Tuesday, in that period, fraught with impatience, between when election workers are counting votes and the results are confirmed. During this interval—which may be only hours, but may run to days in some places—there will be little actual news and many attempts to create some: At the very moment when a watchful press will be desperate for new developments, conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump’s allies will be intent on sowing chaos and doubt.

“It’s going to be a time of high drama,” Darrell West, a senior fellow specializing in governance at the Brookings Institution, told me. There are always small, human-caused errors in polling, but in many decades of American elections, only a handful of cases of voter fraud have ever been found. Any glitch is “likely to be seriously elevated this time, and people will take isolated examples and turn them into system-wide problems that could fuel outrage,” West said. But instead of another concentrated day of “Stop the Steal” violence, as January 6 was in Washington, D.C., West and other experts say that we’re likely to see a more dispersed, harder-to-track election-denial movement. “The violence, if it takes place, will be during the vote-counting process,” he said.

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America has had four years to prepare—legally and logistically—for this election week. Election workers have received new training in case things get rowdy in polling places. Many states have passed laws to clarify the role of poll observers, who can provide valuable transparency but who were deployed by election conspiracists to disrupt the 2020 election—and might be again.

Authorities have also shored up their facilities. In Phoenix, the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, which was ground zero for protests and so many baseless allegations of fraud in 2020, is now surrounded by concrete barriers, armed officers, and a 24/7 video feed for public observation. The county has also developed “robust cybersecurity measures,” J. P. Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, told me, and it has employed on-call experts called “tiger teams” to troubleshoot any tech and security issues.

At the federal level, the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force has already brought 20 charges against people accused of threatening election officials. Each of the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country has designated a district elections officer to handle any Election Day complaints. Still, officials in many states—Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, to name just a few—have purchased panic buttons for their poll workers; some have Narcan on hand in case they find fentanyl in ballot envelopes. “Election officials are risk managers by nature” and have always been well aware of Election Day threats, Kim Wyman, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Washington secretary of state, told me. “What’s new since 2020 is the more personal nature” of those threats.

Although police officers will not be stationed at every polling site in America this year, the presence of law enforcement, including plainclothes officers, will be higher than normal, even if their presence will be intentionally inconspicuous, Chris Harvey, who works with the Committee for 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: available but not obtrusive.

Harvey and his colleagues have spent the past year holding “tabletop exercises” in states across the country. At these trainings, election officials and police collaborate to work through alarming scenarios, including bomb threats to a voting precinct, active-shooter reports, and what, exactly, should happen if a group of armed men turns up outside a polling place in a state with open-carry laws. We “let each side sort of express their concerns: what the election officials would like the cops to do, what the cops tell the election officials they have the ability to do,” Harvey said. “If nothing else, they at least get familiar with each other.”

When Harvey first started this project, most of the law-enforcement attendees seemed bored, he told me—but in the past six months, “interest has increased dramatically.” Officers are realizing that this election season could be more volatile than any in recent memory. “People have had four years of marinating in conspiracy theories,” Harvey said. So when they go to vote, “they’ll be primed for any type of confrontation—or something they see as suspicious or evidence of fraud.” Before 2020, police officers could generally assume that most of the hard work was done when the polls closed. Now, Harvey said, they’re aware that when polls close on Election Day, that “might just be the beginning.”

That brings us to what experts believe is a more realistic hypothetical than violence on Election Day itself: a breakdown of public order resulting from days of confusion and impatience. Think hordes of people rioting outside polling centers across America, and stalking or physically attacking election officials. Imagine 2020, experts say, only worse.

Trump’s supporters do not seem at all prepared to accept a loss. And any claim of a stolen election this year could prompt them to take matters into their own hands. In 2020, cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Phoenix, and Atlanta witnessed swarms of angry people, riled up by false claims of voter fraud. These are places where, to this day, election officials receive a high volume of threats.

Delays will make things worse. Most states allow election workers to begin processing early ballots before Election Day, which helps speed up the counting process. Unfortunately, two states that still do not allow this are Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both electoral battlegrounds that could determine the outcome. Results are expected to take a while in the key states of Georgia and North Carolina, too. Counting, auditing, recounting—“all that stuff will draw a crowd and have an intimidating effect on the poll workers,” Harvey said.

Take Pennsylvania, a state seen as a must-win for both Kamala Harris and Trump. “We could end up in a situation where early tabulation shows Trump ahead, and Wednesday through Friday [that lead] starts to slip away,” West said. “That’s a bad formula for people who don’t trust the system.” Trump has again primed his supporters to pay special attention to Philadelphia. If it looks like Harris is edging ahead, West said, the city “will be the epicenter of a lot of the anger.”

Philly leaders are aware of this. Since 2020, they’ve moved the entire central election operation away from downtown 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 defended by a fence, barbed wire, and security checkpoints. “We are prepared, with our partners in law enforcement throughout the city, for anything that could come our way,” Lisa Deeley, a city commissioner, told me. Other states say that they, too, are ready for any contingency. In emailed statements, officials in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada confirmed to me that they had enhanced safety measures to protect the count. “We just have to be on the watch for outside agitators,” Darryl Woods, the chair of the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners, told me. “Foolishness will not be tolerated.”

No one seems too worried about D.C. this year. The Department of Homeland Security has designated January 6, 2025, as a National Special Security Event, and D.C. police have given press conferences assuring citizens of law-enforcement preparedness for any election-related disorder before or on that date. Some experts told me that the days with greater potential for risk this time are December 11, the deadline by which states must certify their election results, and December 17, when electors meet in their states to vote for president. If the election is close, both days could see protests and violence in the states where the margin is tightest, West said.

One welcome bit of reassurance is the fact that experts don’t anticipate the kind of paramilitary mobilization America saw in 2020, when unrest over the police killing of George Floyd and the COVID-19 lockdowns had people marching in the streets and extremist groups deploying around the country. Prominent members of militia-type organizations, such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, that achieved national prominence in 2020 are thankfully in jail, and many groups have refocused their efforts at a local level, Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Georgetown, told me.

Still, McCord is watching the parts of the country where these militias have regrouped, which, in some cases, happen to coincide with parts of the country where experienced election officials have been replaced with election deniers, including parts of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and Arizona. If there are moves, after the election, to implement independent state legislature theory and replace slates of electors, McCord said, “you can imagine extremists glomming onto that.”

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Whatever intimidation and violence may occur in the coming weeks, election workers and volunteers will almost certainly feel it most. Many of them have been receiving threats for years, and continue forwarding them, by muscle memory, to local authorities. Paradoxically, the election officials most likely to come under hostile pressure from MAGA activists are themselves Republicans.

Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder in Maricopa County, faced immense pressure and vile threats in 2020. But so did Leslie Hoffman, a Republican in deep-red Yavapai County. So did Anne Dover, the election director in Trump-voting Cherokee County, Georgia. And so did Tina Barton, a Republican clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, who was accused of cheating to help Joe Biden, and received a voicemail promising that “10,000 patriots” would find and kill her. No evidence of fraud was uncovered in any of these counties. (The threatening “patriot” was identified, charged, and later sentenced to 14 months in jail.)

This year, despite everything, some of those same officials remain remarkably hopeful. “While I have anxiety and concern about what we could see over the next few days and weeks, and maybe even into a few months,” Barton, who now works for the nonpartisan Elections Group, told me, “I have to think that the good in humanity and the good in America will ultimately win.”