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Police and election officials across the U.S. are preparing for a wave of disinformation-fueled violence after the upcoming midterm elections if losing candidates refuse to accept defeat and fire up their supporters online to challenge the results, law enforcement sources told Newsweek.
Electoral mistrust has soared since President Donald Trump's false claim to have won the 2020 presidential vote and it shows every sign of intensifying ahead of the November 8 midterm elections in which President Joe Biden is fighting to keep the Republicans from taking the Senate and House of Representatives with close-fought battles also for governorships and other state posts.
"The threat environment is the most dangerous I've ever seen in my entire 38-year career," John Cohen, former intelligence chief for the Department of Homeland Security, told Newsweek. "This is a threat that could potentially impact the stability of the nation."
A bulletin issued this week by New York police's intelligence bureau said that "political rallies, poll workers and voting sites" could be "targets for opportunistic violence" by "racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists and anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists," one person who had seen a copy told Newsweek. Their identity could not be disclosed because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
And at an online briefing October 19, the Major County Sheriffs of America and the Major Cities Chiefs' Association warned more than 550 local police leaders about intelligence reports of a range of risks to election security, including physical threats to polling places and election workers. The briefing included presentations by the FBI and DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA.
Briefing organizer Orange County, Calif., Sheriff Don Barnes told Newsweek that extremist communications monitored by law enforcement indicated polling sites and workers might be in danger, but said there weren't specific threats against particular places. He declined to give further details.
Cohen said the battle against online conspiracy theories was being lost while prospects for trouble were raised by the number of Republican candidates who have said they would not accept results that go against them.
Earlier this month, CISA issued a training video for local elections officials on how to "de-escalate" potential confrontations. Officials say it's designed to help election workers deal with a wave of ill-informed and often angry questions from so-called election deniers, who believe that Trump won in 2020. A Monmouth University national poll last month found that 29 percent of Americans (and 61 percent of Republicans) believe President Biden "only won due to voter fraud."
A special federal task force to tackle threats against election workers set up last year has received more than 1,000 reports of such threats across the country, officials say, and 11 percent resulted in FBI investigations.
Responding to threats of violence around elections is a balancing act, Barnes said. Officers must ensure the safety and security of the election process, without creating the appearance that they were impinging on people's First Amendment rights or menacing them. Not all voters would be reassured, for example, by the presence of police at a polling station. "There may be some that might feel more secure. And there may be some in that same neighborhood who feel like they're being intimidated or dissuaded from voting. And that's the last thing you want," he said.
Rachel Orey, associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center Elections Project, told Newsweek: "Many states limit the degree to which law enforcement officers can be present at voting sites," given the history of police conducting voter suppression in the Jim Crow era.
She said she hoped nonetheless that election officials would arrange to have plainclothes law enforcement in or near voting sites so they could respond quickly to any issues.
"I would urge law enforcement to be very public" about the measures they are taking, even behind the scenes, said Cohen, to "instill confidence in voters that the election will be secure and deter those considering acts of violence."
CISA officials, who in previous election cycles have centered their activities on foreign cyber and misinformation threats, have been paying attention closer to home this time.
The physical security environment for the upcoming midterms is "probably much more challenging than any [previous] election year," CISA Director Jenn Easterly told reporters on a conference call earlier this month.
With early voting already underway in some states, polling locations such as ballot drop boxes have become the site of heightened tensions. In Maricopa County, Arizona, small groups of people have filmed voters and photographed their license plates as they deposited early ballots in the county's two 24-hour drop box locations, leading to complaints by some voters of intimidation, according to the Arizona Republic.
In one incident, recorded on county surveillance cameras, two men in tactical gear with visible handguns kept watch on a ballot drop box in Mesa for about 15 minutes. They left after a conversation with sheriff's deputies.
Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland, asked about such incidents at a press briefing, promised that "the Justice Department has an obligation to guarantee a free and fair vote by everyone who's qualified to vote and will not permit voters to be intimidated."
The FBI declined requests for an interview, but on its website, the agency says that it has appointed "election crimes coordinators" in every FBI field office, and has "prepared for election threats in scenario-based exercises." The bureau will have election "command posts" at FBI headquarters and in its field offices to respond to election-related incidents, the posting said.
From doubt to denialism
Polling data shows election doubts aren't only confined to Republican supporters of former President Trump, though they are much more prevalent there.
Overall, only just over half (52 percent) of all Americans were confident or very confident that the results of the upcoming election would be "accurate and fair" if someone they opposed won, according to a new national poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Among self-identified Republicans, a majority (52 percent) were "not very confident" or "not at all confident" the results would be fair if their own party lost, compared to fewer than one in five (18 percent) of Democrats.
In a separate question, nearly half of all respondents (64 percent of Democratic voters and 41 percent of Republicans, or 48 percent overall) said they were either concerned or very concerned "about the possibility of violence associated with the 2022 midterm elections."
"Obviously, if people don't think it's fair, they're going to get angry," UMass Political Science Professor Ray La Raja, the poll's associate director, told Newsweek. "It's possible some of them might be inclined to violence."
"It's crucial how close the election is and how the candidate behaves," he added.
Some Republicans have made election fraud a theme of their campaign. Some have alleged that armies of "vote harvesters" stuffed ballot drop boxes. Others speak of "unanswered questions" or "unexplained anomalies" over results that have been shown accurate by recounts, audits and the failure of court challenges against them.
By mobilizing their supporters for what they call "election integrity" activities such as dropbox watch parties, "they're already setting up a premise for saying there could be cheating," La Raja said. He expects any violence to be isolated outbreaks involving small groups, because it would be driven by anger about a particular local election.
"Even if it's minimal, it's still terrible," he said.
The rise of election denialists
La Raja said that fears of violence were being fed by Republican candidates who continue to say that Trump was the real winner in 2020.
Almost two in three Americans (58.5% percent of the population, living in 30 states) have an election denier running to oversee future elections as governor, attorney general or secretary of state, according to research by the States United Action Center, which describes itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit advocating to protect election integrity and advance the truth about elections.
After deniers lost their primary battles earlier this year, several did not accept the results. In Florida's 11th district, for instance, conservative activist and election denier Laura Loomer refused to concede defeat in her primary challenge to incumbent GOP Congressman Daniel Webster.
In a video viewed more than a million times, Loomer told supporters, "I'm not conceding because I'm a winner and the reality is our Republican party is broken to its core." She said repeatedly that she was the victim of "election interference" and a "voter fraud machine," without providing evidence beyond allegations that her campaign had been sidelined by both the traditional media and social/internet media.
She noted that she lost by 5,210 votes, "and when you look at the impact that big tech and social media and the internet plays in our society today, there was no denying that there was voter fraud and election interference in this campaign," she said.
"We are never going to have another free and fair election in this country ever again until we strongarm the Republican Party into addressing these [election integrity] issues," she said.
In Nevada, election denier Jim Marchant told the Las Vegas Review Journal that he was not confident in the result even after being selected as Republican candidate for Secretary of State.
"There's a lot of doubts in electronic voting systems," he explained. "Fraud is a harsh word, but there could have been anomalies — malicious or accidental — based on what I've heard."
Secretaries of state are the officials who runs elections. Marchant is one of 13 election deniers running in the 27 contests for secretary of state posts across the country, according to the States United Democracy Center.
Among other candidates, Republican Arizona gubernatorial contender Kari Lake has not committed to accepting the result if she is defeated. "I'm going to win the election, and I will accept that result," Lake told CNN.
Manufacturing chaos after the polls close
Multiple experts told Newsweek that the most dangerous period will be immediately after polls close, when unofficial results start to come out, and initial reporting begins to circulate online, sometimes including confused, inaccurate or fabricated accounts of alleged suspicious behavior by voters or poll workers.
"The biggest threat to the elections is 'manufactured chaos' – defeated candidates in close races throwing around unsubstantiated allegations that undermine Americans' faith in the outcome of their democratic process," Eddie Perez, a veteran non-partisan elections technology expert who worked on civic integrity issues for Twitter, told Newsweek.
All of the major social networks have programs they say are designed to fulfill a civic duty to provide accurate information about the election and ensure people know how and when they can vote.
Facebook has already spun up a 24/7 operations center to monitor election information on its platform, and is working with its network of certified third-party fact-checking non-profits to add labels and algorithmically slow the spread of any false stories, Senior Content Policy Manager Aaron Berman told Newsweek.
Content that creates a risk of direct and imminent harm, such as incitement to violence, or that spreads inaccurate information about how and where to vote will be removed altogether because it violates Facebook's community standards, Berman added.
That includes "advocating for violence due to voting, voter registration or the administration or outcome of an election," he explained, as well as any posts advocating bringing weapons to polling places, counting sites or election administration centers.
"Our goal is to ensure Facebook's policies and our community standards are applied consistently and quickly," he said.
Critics say the fact-checking process is too slow, but Berman said the integrity of the process was paramount. "Speed is important, but it's also important to get it right," he said.
Facebook is also working to ensure its users have accurate information about the elections in English and Spanish, Berman said. Users who search for election related terms on Facebook will see links to official information at the top of their search results.
This proactive approach to combating misinformation, sometimes called pre-bunking, is being adopted by CISA, too. The agency's rumor control website attempts to provide facts to counter unsubstantiated claims.
But all platforms face a particular problem with election misinformation: What do you do when it's coming from the candidates? Candidate speech has traditionally been amongst the categories of speech most protected by constitutional law.
"The hardest challenge of all is the fact that a lot of this mis- and disinformation is happening out in the open by candidates themselves," former Facebook elections policy chief Katie Harbath told Newsweek.
Facebook's fact-checking process doesn't apply to content directly from candidates, although stories they share that have failed a fact check will still carry the label and be subject to algorithmic throttling.
That means that candidates' claims about election fraud won't be subject to fact-checking, although if they advocate violence or otherwise breach community standards, the posts will be removed.
Every state has different rules about recounts, and in many it may not be clear for a week or more whether a recount is warranted. "There will be legitimate challenges" to early unofficial results, Harbath said, which might not be immediately distinguishable from frivolous or malicious ones.
The complexity of the situation will hamstring the platforms, she said. "They don't want to be seen as putting their thumbs on the scale, particularly in that in-between time when candidates have that right to challenge the election" and ongoing court cases might determine the outcome in close races.
And the chaos will likely not end, even as those cases conclude and the elections are certified, first at the county, and then the state level.
"The lesson from 2020 is that campaigns will go through the legal challenge process and not accept the result," said GOP election uber-lawyer Ben Ginsburg, co-chair of the Election Officials Legal Defense Network. He called this "categorically different from what previously happened with tight and contested elections."
"The real issue is whether candidates will accept the result and I think there's a big question mark there," he said.
"The incentives are misaligned for candidates today," said the Bipartisan Policy Center's Orey. "Where previously the basic norms and expectations for candidates were that the results would be respected, former President Trump taught candidates that election denialism is a ripe and effective fundraising and campaign tactic....In the past, contested elections were one-off controversies, they are now part of a culture of distrust ... that increasingly entertains anti-democratic sentiment."
This report has been corrected so that it accurately identifies the authors of the research from the States United Action Center, and to correctly identify Eddie Perez as a veteran nonpartisan election technology expert.
