“The front of the mob was coming toward us in that hallway. You could hear them. I didn’t see them because I was fussing [with my gas mask],” recalled U.S. Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.), who was one of four lawmakers less than 50 feet from a group of Jan. 6 Insurrectionists as Kuster and her Congressional colleagues were evacuated from the House gallery. “A group of [insurrectionists] had come up that staircase and come down that hallway… That eight-and-a-half minutes, with all my colleagues still stuck inside the chamber, pinned down, calling their families to say goodbye.”
Kuster and her lawmaker peers weren’t sure if they would live past that day. And they were surrounded by heavily armed security.
But what of regular citizens, election officials, poll workers, and voters who are planning to exercise their constitutional rights during this year’s election without the shield of armed protectors and in a context of ever-increasing, election-related threats of violence and chaos?
TEXAS
In the Lone Star State, election officials are worried about the growing number of threats to election departments and sites.
“The threats to the election system as a whole is problematic. Unfortunately, we have people that have made threats,” said Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai said during a press conference last week.
Bexar County, home to San Antonio, is enjoying a record-breaking number of registered voters, surpassing 2020’s previous top number. The growing mistrust in the election process that fomented after the 2020 Presidential Election and the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection initiated by then-President Donald Trump, has election officials statewide worried about potential violence on election night.
And Texas is not alone in fearing potential election-related violence.
In September, election officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, from seven battleground states met in Atlanta and compared notes in preparation for Election Day. One of the common threads between them was the stress and anxiety of their jobs, fueled in large part by the fear of potential violence.
“The biggest thing I worry about is the possibility of violence by people who lose,” said Republican Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for Georgia’s office of secretary of state.
“We’re daily receiving threats, whether it’s through voicemails, emails, social media or in person,” shared Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat.
But what is just as worrisome to many are efforts to stir up potential Election Night chaos by Republican election officials and officeholders—actions that could fan the flames of violent threats becoming violent realities.
GEORGIA
Georgia’s Republican Party is being accused of seeking to purposely create election night chaos by requiring a hand count of the state’s millions of votes.
Despite widespread warnings of chaos and ideological overreach from the offices of the Republican Secretary of State and attorney general, a Trump-loyalist majority on Georgia’s State Election Board ordered by a 3-2 vote the bizarre procedure of hand-counting ballots in every single precinct in that intensely competitive battleground state, beginning on Election Night.
The rule requires the hand count to take place the night of the November election or the next day. But dozens of election officials said that would be physically impossible in all but the smallest counties. As the Washington Post explains, the rule change, if implemented, would most definitely slow down determination of Georgia’s election winners and threaten the whole system with unbearable strains.
Those strains will probably mean the state of Georgia will not be able to certify its election results by the required deadline, thereby forcing the entire election certification to be shifted to the U.S. Congress, where Republicans have the majority, and can hand the election victory to Trump even if he loses the projected popular vote and projected Electoral College vote. And at the very least, an entire state delaying election results certification can possibly generate national doubt about the election results, one of the foundational goals of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
NEBRASKA
Republicans in Nebraska attempted to change the electoral system in that state to give Trump a possible advantage in the event of a tied presidential election. That attempt has been rebuffed after a state legislator refused to back the plan.
Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who crossed to the Republican party this year, said he would not vote to change Nebraska’s long-held distribution of electors to the same winner-takes-all process that operates in most of the US.
A change in the allocation of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes could have had a decisive impact on the outcome of the 5 November poll. Why? Because keeping the system as is reduces the possibility that the Trump and Harris could be tied on 269 electoral college votes each, a scenario that would throw the final say on the election’s outcome to the House of Representatives.
The changes Republicans lobbied for could have set up a tie scenario if Trump earned five electoral votes – rather than four, as expected under the present set-up – from winning Nebraska, then won the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, while Harris carried the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
FLORIDA
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opted to use his executive power to attack a state ballot initiative that would overturn the state’s cruel and inhumane six-week abortion ban and secure the right to abortion in the state constitution. The reason this is viewed as an attempt to sway Florida for Trump is because every time abortion has been on a state ballot, reproductive freedom has won. If Florida’s initiative, known as Amendment 4, stays on the ballot, the thinking is it increases the chances that Harris will take the Sunshine State.
Additionally, DeSantis has threatened to sue local media who report on Amendment 4 in a way he disagrees with, a move many are calling media censorship.
Moreover, like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, DeSantis has deployed law enforcement for what democracy activists contend are suspect “election fraud” visits to voters’ houses—where police raid the homes of people who signed the petition to qualify the initiative for the ballot simply to intimidate them. DeSantis is also using state resources to create an anti-Amendment 4 website filled with disinformation about abortion, according to Politico.
This back-and-forth may lead to election night confusion.
