On the final days of his campaign trail, US Republican candidate Donald Trump has been repeating that if he loses Tuesday’s elections, it is because the Democrats cheated, stoking fears of a violent response to any potential victory of Vice President Kamala Harris. Ten states have put their National Guard units on stand-by to quell unrest as a result.
On one occasion, Trump told his rally-goers that he “never should have left the Oval Office” in 2021, when he incited his supporters to march to the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in what turned out to be a deadly insurrection attempt. After nearly four years of legal challenges and inquiries, there has been no evidence found to support Trump’s claim of a “stolen” election.
With nationwide polls predicting a dead heat in this year’s contest, and fake, manipulative social media posts fanning the flames, tensions have never been higher; and Americans are bracing themselves for a repeat of the last presidential election’s chaos.
The Harris campaign said in an interview with ABC News last week that they are preparing for the possibility that Trump might prematurely claim victory before all votes are counted, as he did in 2020.
“We are sadly ready if he does and, if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people... we are prepared to respond,” Harris said, outlining a basic plan for social media calls for calm in that event.
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“This is sowing the seeds for attempts to overturn an election. We saw it in 2020, and I think the lesson Trump and his allies have learned since is that they have to sow these ideas early,” Kyle Miller, a strategist with the advocacy group Protect Democracy told Reuters.
As they push an angry, anti-immigration agenda, Trump allies have sounded the alarm that non-US citizens have flooded the ballot boxes with their illegal votes. At least one study done by the Brennan Center for Justice, found only 30 confirmed instances of these illegal votes out of 23.5 million votes it reviewed after the 2016 election, and made no mention of whether the votes were for Trump (who won that election) or for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Non-existent nuns in Pennsylvania, a Republican operative falsely claims
In a famous case in late October, a fervent Trump supporter and Republican canvasser was going door-to-door in the swing state of Pennsylvania and noticed what he reckoned was a vacant building where dozens of voters were registered. He reported on social media that nobody even lived at that address, thereby proving these conspiracy theories.
As it turned out, the building was inhabited by about 50 Benedictine nuns, and the sisters who handled the reception desk said that this Cliff Maloney fellow (whose inflammatory post accusing the organization of voter fraud received about 3 million views on X) never came to the door. The sisters said that they were considering legal action against the Republican operative as a result.
“To be unjustly accused of voter fraud is just really disgusting, ugly,” Sister Stephanie Schmidt, the prioress, told The Washington Post.
In another instance, focusing on another swing state, Georgia, a video went viral last week purporting to show non-US-citizens from Haiti in line to vote for the US president. To nobody’s surprise, this also turned out to be a fake, and in an even less-surprising wrinkle, US officials from various agencies last week determined that the video campaign was the work of Kremlin propagandists, as part of Putin’s efforts to sow discord among the American electorate.
Then, in Pennsylvania’s Northampton County, Reuters reported, a Republican activist posted a video of someone allegedly dropping off a bin of fake ballots to the county courthouse. The post viewed about five million times, casting more unfounded suspicious. But, you guessed it, the delivery actually was made by a US postal worker, “literally just delivering the mail,” said Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt.
Trump nonetheless took the opportunity to capitalize on the since-disproven accusations, saying in a social media post last Thursday: “We caught them CHEATING BIG in Pennsylvania,” and demanded criminal prosecutions.
Ballots burned, stolen, in Democrat-leaning districts
In fact, there has been some actual ballot misfeasance documented in America this election season, although the incidents occurred in liberal-leaning parts of the Pacific Northwest and Florida.
Last week, hundreds of ballots were set on fire at two ballot-drop boxes in the states of Washington and Oregon, both of which overwhelmingly voted against Trump in 2016 and 2020. Investigators are still searching for a suspect that they believe is responsible for both incidents.
Almost all the burned ballots that were in a box in Vancouver, Washington, were destroyed, while most of the voting slips in a box in Portland, Oregon (close to the state of Washington, both geographically and politically) survived a fire set the same day, election officials said. The incidents are believed to be connected, wire reports quoted state officials as saying.
Meanwhile, in the Democrat-heavy Miami-Dade county of Florida, a civilian found a box and a bag carrying early voting ballots lying in the middle of the road. The driver returned the ballots to a police station, and nothing in the box and bag was tampered with, according to elections staff.
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