The USA is preparing for election riots. but how high is the risk?

• In the US, they are preparing for civil unrest around the elections.
• Analysts say that election day itself is not as high a risk as the period after the election.
• Although the 2022 midterm elections were peaceful, tensions are rising during the presidential election.

The upheavals that followed the last US presidential election left their mark.

So this time around, as Election Day nears, businesses and governments across the country are preparing ahead of time — especially if the results are close.

The consensus until Election Day is that it will.

Seven states of oscillation offer each candidate several ways to win. Final polls show the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump virtually tied nationally.

Glen Kucera, head of private security company Allied Universal, told Business Insider that his clientele is so concerned that they are looking for more resources to protect themselves. and their business.

“The threat is, as it were, inevitable and ubiquitous,” Kuchera said. “We’re trying to get ahead of the threat.”

It seems to be at the last stage before the election day like everyone from voter rights groups and election officials to risk management and security companies are preparing for civil unrest.

“I think what’s on people’s minds right now are the emotions, the anger, related to some of these elections,” Kuchera said. “We’re being sent out to try to identify all of these immediate threats and try to protect the public in the run-up to this election.”

But how high is the risk?

Election day is not the most exciting

Election day itself is unlikely to be the day of the highest risk for Rachel Brown, an expert on violence, hate speech and civic activism at Over Zero, which works to prevent identity-based violence.

Related stories

“I would not expect that we will see a high level of organized violence. People should feel safe voting, and if there’s any danger, it’s probably going to be very localized, like one person taking action where there seem to be groups trying to mobilize,” Brown said Friday at a press conference. – a conference organized by the National Working Group on Electoral Crisis (NTFEC), a cross-party electoral organization.

That appears to be the case in Washington and Oregon, where authorities are looking for what they say is a loner the performer responsible for placing incendiary devices in at least two ballot boxes, which burned hundreds of ballots. Officials in Clark County, Washington, where about 488 ballots were damaged, said in a news release that they have contacted most of the affected voters to issue them replacement ballots.

According to Brown, there are protections for the voting process, voters and election workers. Voter intimidation is a criminal offense and is subject to prosecution, and local polling sites are preparing for any incidents, including live-action attacks, where a fake call to law enforcement is made to provoke an armed response, Brown said.

“Some of the threats that many of us don’t even think about on a daily basis, election officials work day in and day out to prevent and respond to,” said Chris Crawford, NTFEC staff member and policy strategist for Protect Democracy. on the panel. “There are remedies when these actions occur that election officials can still try to ensure that every person can receive and count their votes.”

There is probably a greater risk after the election, when the results may be decided in court and not on election night. Then it will be a waiting game until Congress counts the electoral votes on January 6th, followed by the presidential inauguration on January 20th.

Brown said she is “most concerned” by the surge in conspiracy theories and threats to state capitols, polling places and those who oversee them.

Anticipating such unrest after the election, businesses in Portland and other cities began to board up their windows.

“Violence tends to aim at process and negate outcomes,” Brown said. “We know the dates that are relevant to the process and we can predict where this might happen, but in the coming elections we may see the use of violence or intimidation to try to influence the processing of the results.”

How big is the risk?

Verisk, a data analysis and risk management company, has included the United States in the top five countries with the highest risk. for civil disturbances, which may also lead to significant insurance losses, in the following year. Brazil, Colombia, Chile and South Africa round out the list, while France, Greece and Spain are the riskiest in Europe.

Verisk wrote in an October analysis that election-related violence is rare in the United States and that the Jan. 6, 2021, riots were “the preeminent protest event in U.S. history.” The company said the peaceful 2022 midterm elections showed that the threat of civil violence remains relatively low.

But emotions run high during presidential elections, and the company’s strike and civil unrest forecasting model found that tensions and political polarization could reach a boiling point, sparking unrest in urban centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.

“Not only is the underlying SRCC risk higher than in January 2021, the potential for outbreaks that could trigger civil unrest is also greater,” Torbjörn Soltvedt, principal analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, said in a press release.

Robert Manx, Verisk’s head of research for the Americas, said risks could also increase after the election during certification processes.

“Certainly, the risk of election-related unrest will increase significantly if the election results are hotly contested,” Manx said, “especially if Trump loses to Harris.”