The presidential battle may not end on Election Day

Extremist political rhetoric and actions have taken center stage in the run-up to today’s crucial election day in the US.

In the Pacific Northwest, several ballot drop boxes were set on fire last week, with hundreds of ballots lost to the flames. While anyone who has placed ballots in these mailboxes within a certain time period can request to fill out a new ballot, there is no guarantee that they will do so. In practice, it is likely that many burned ballots simply will not be counted.

At a private banquet late last month, Congressman Andy Harris of Maryland, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, considered the possibility that North Carolina lawmakers would forego the niceties of an election and simply give the state’s 16 Electoral College votes to former President Donald Trump could assign. North Carolina has a supermajority Republican legislature that can override a Democratic governor’s veto. Oddly, the congressman argued that this would be done to protect voters, some of whom he said may have difficulty getting to the polls after last month’s devastating hurricane.

This is not the first time such a strategy has been developed. Over the past year and a half, a handful of far-right lawmakers in Arizona have proposed a similar severance of the democratic process. For people who claim to define their politics by the love of “freedom,” such a conspiracy should be simply incomprehensible. Instead, they rely on ideas such as acceptable strategies in a zero-sum power game.

Upon his release from prison last week, right-wing provocateur and strategist Steve Bannon explained that, as he did in 2020, Trump should preemptively try to declare victory on election night before all the votes are counted. In other words, “Fake it ’til you make it.”

Meanwhile, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Trump alluded to a “little secret” they have cooked up to ensure a Trump victory; Commentators say it could well be a matter of a Republican-led House refusing to count voters from states where Trump has launched legal challenges, or trying to hand the entire presidential election to the House and individual state delegations to leave – of which 26 are Republican majorities.

While one would assume that a sober-minded Supreme Court would step in to stop such violently anti-democratic antics, the far-right majority on that court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, have made their political leanings all too clear over the past year . In July, the court found that Trump was largely immune from prosecution for otherwise illegal acts he committed while president; and the most outspoken conservative on the bench, Justice Samuel Alito, was reported to have flown an upside-down flag outside his home after the 2020 election, a gesture widely interpreted as an expression of sympathy for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.

Meanwhile, associates of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the original far-right incarnations of the MAGA movement, have been traveling the country preparing followers for what they say is a second Jan. 6, another attempt at certification to prevent the Electoral College from voting if Trump loses. The general himself was a little more reserved – in a conversation in which questioners touched on the question of whether there should be military tribunals and executions against MAGA’s political enemies, Flynn did not promise an insurrection, but vowed to open “the gates of hell” against opponents and supposed enemies, should Trump win and put him back in a position of power.

Trump has repeatedly spoken of the “enemy within” on his campaign platform and suggested that he would use the military against such figures. Among the people he describes as such enemies are former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff, who is running for U.S. senator from California. He has also announced that if elected he will immediately fire special counsel Jack Smith and has suggested that Smith should be banned from the United States. It is a crude vision of gaining power at all costs and creates the narrative that only one outcome is possible.

There are, of course, those who say that these antics should be done just for fun – that it’s just an over-the-top way to let off steam in a stressful environment. That is not the case. In reality, the increasing threats to the country’s democratic processes have profound consequences and may lead the United States down an extremely dark path. When entire races and nations are denigrated at political rallies like the one at New York’s Madison Square Garden last month, it has a ripple effect across the entire culture. When a senior politician like Trump conjures up bloody images against his opponents, as he did last week when he suggested that Liz Cheney should have guns pointed at them, there are consequences.

When fascist messaging becomes normalized—as Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly, both of whom served in the Trump administration, have described the former president’s worldview in recent weeks—the impact on society as a whole becomes clear. There’s a license for everything from online trolling to vigilante preparations.

Across the United States, election workers are facing threats. Over the past two years, the Justice Department has prosecuted about 400 cases related to such threats. What is even more worrying is that right-wing groups themselves brag about their willingness to use violence. And this in a country with around 400 million privately owned weapons.

People have been voting for weeks. Election Day is finally here, but that doesn’t mean this election cycle is over. In a healthy democracy, this would be done once the votes have been received and counted. In the United States in 2024, there is no sign that the political struggle will end today. Instead, there could be months of legal and political battles over how votes are counted and results are certified. Hovering over all of this is the very real possibility of violence and right-wing violence. It is a threat that would have been familiar to residents of a number of European countries in the early 1930s as their democracies collapsed before the gathering forces of fascism. It is a threat that we ignore today at our peril.