Officials, voters bracing for possible violence after election

US marine veteran Jimmy, who didn’t want to give his surname, is expecting trouble if Donald Trump doesn’t win.Credit: Farrah Tomazin

Asked if he believed Harris could win, he replied: “No. She has no shot in hell of winning. They’re gonna cheat again.”

Another Trump supporter, David Scully, shared a similar view. “I think there will be discontent,” he said in Aston, where Trump’s vice presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, was campaigning with Trump’s son Donald Jr.

“But I think it might [depend on] where or when or how the votes went. I might also be mad at Trump and the team for not winning, or not having a better campaign.”

This year’s presidential election will be the first since the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Authorities are less fearful of a repeat attack on the Capitol – Washington, DC, already looks like a fortress – but they worry about radicalised lone wolves targeting polling centres or officials.

“What I am concerned about is mentally unstable human beings who think they’re saving America because he or she said, ‘These people are evil and I have to stop them’,” Georgia election official Gabe Sterling told this masthead this month.

“We can get the organised groups … The FBI does a great job with that. But the individual radicalised person is next to impossible to stop, and that’s my bigger fear overall.”

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Some signs of election-related violence have already emerged: last week, hundreds of ballots were either destroyed or damaged in arson attacks on two ballot drop boxes in Washington state and Oregon.

The fires followed a US Department of Homeland Security bulletin warning in September that “some social media users are discussing and encouraging various methods of sabotaging ballot drop boxes and avoiding detection, likely heightening the potential for targeting of this election infrastructure through the 2024 election cycle”.

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