MAGAReport 10/20/24 - Election Violence
It's time for election officials to start preparing for violence, especially in Georgia
As we close in on the election, I’m shifting to monitoring for election violence, and things are already getting serious. While there are no specific threats (e.g. “let’s meet at this place at this time and do this thing”), I’d be very worried if I were a poll worker, especially in Gerogia. Here’s what I’m seeing.
The lie that the 2020 election was stolen is cannon, not just in the extremist MAGA circles, but in mainstream ones. Trump talks about this frequently at his rallies and in interviews, and in the more extreme forums I monitor, the participants have been whipping themselves into a frenzy about it for weeks. They are settling on specific events that they will take as evidence of fraud and openly discussing violence as the solution. Specifically:
The far-right MAGA crowd believes that if vote counts are not fully finalized on election night, that it is irrefutable evidence of election fraud.
Many states have already said their votes will not be finalized on November 5th, and this is quite normal. Mail-in votes that can be postmarked by election day take time to arrive, provisional ballots need to be reconciled, etc.A lot of people on these forums state that election workers should be killed for committing election fraud / treason. Note that not finalizing counts on the night of Nov. 5th would qualify as an execution-worthy offense under this logic. Here are some excerpts from discussions today (these were posted in response to a list of states who announced their vote counts will not be final on election night):
Elon Musk has added a lot of fuel to this fire by calling on people to share “evidence” of voter fraud on Twitter.
It’s hard to see this combination of factors leading to anything other than mass doxxing of poll workers and election officials in counties where MAGAs turn their attention, and potential violence against those workers. We saw this play out in 2020 in Georgia with Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, whose lives were totally upended by the pro-Trump apparatus (they eventually won a defamation suit against Rudy Giuliani and just settled with OAN a couple weeks ago).
The extremist MAGA crowd is more committed to violence this time. Election officials should being ready for this, and the AP has an excellent article describing preparations that are underway across the country.
From my perspective looking at online spaces, the biggest deterrent is the threat of being arrested. I will be doing another post later this week about how the fear of arrest has cooled any enthusiasm for MAGA demonstrations outside of formal Trump rallies. If law enforcement acts quickly, identifying people behind “anonymous” threats and making examples of those threatening or committing violence, there is potential to stop things before they get out of hand.
An extra frustrating thing about this is that it has already been hard to recruit poll workers because of fear around violence, all while the Trump campaign has been organizing supporters to volunteer both as poll workers and election monitors.
The majority of attention I see so far remains on Georgia, so Fulton County is where I plan to be on election night.