Consider This from NPR - Why Federal Security Agencies Are Warning About Potential Election Violence

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

The attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband and other recent incidents have security experts worried about the potential for political violence around the midterm elections. NPR's Miles Parks and Odette Yousef explain what law enforcement and elections officials are preparing for.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

President Biden had a warning this week for Americans. We must, with one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country and say there's no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America, whether it's directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever. Now, this was a political speech in the closing days of a heated midterm election campaign. Biden took aim at former President Trump and other Republicans. But the fact is, this year has brought plenty of evidence that violence and politics are colliding in this country. Police have arrested a California man they say was armed

with a gun and a knife near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home in suburban Maryland. That alleged attempted murder came in June as the court appeared poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Then in August, after far-right voices like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon pushed conspiracy theories about the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago. Breaking news out of Ohio, the FBI says an armed man tried to enter a field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun and a rifle. And last week, prosecutors say a man carrying zip ties, rope and hammers broke into the San Francisco home of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband, Paul. According

to the criminal complaint filed against David DePapp, he told police he planned to take the speaker hostage and called her the, quote, leader of the pack of lies told by the Democratic Party. Thank you all for coming this afternoon. At a press conference announcing charges against the suspect, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said the attack unnerved her as a political figure in the city. And it's very sad to see that we are once again at a point in history where people believe that it's okay to express their political sentiments through violence. Experts who study domestic extremism say the attack at Pelosi's home fits a trend. This is happening within the context of a tremendous increase in threats being made against public officials and our elected representatives. Michael Jensen is a senior domestic terrorism researcher at the University of Maryland. You have to imagine that the average

school board member or the average, you know, local county election official isn't walking around with something like the Secret Service or Marshal Service protecting them. They don't have any protection at all. And so if an individual sets their sights on one of these targets, there's not a lot stopping them. Consider this. The U.S. has seen a rising wave of domestic extremism, and security agencies are warning of potential violence around the midterm elections. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Thursday, November 3rd. This message comes from WISE,

the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. When San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced the charges against Paul Pelosi's alleged attacker. She added this. One last thing that I want to say today is that as leaders and as citizens, it is incumbent upon us all to watch the words that we say and to turn down the volume of our political rhetoric. Politicians on both sides of the aisle did condemn the attack.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a dastardly act. And here's Speaker Pelosi's Republican counterpart, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, speaking on Fox News. Well, let me be perfectly clear. Violence or threaded violence has no place in our society. What happened to Paul Pelosi is wrong. But some Republicans struck a different tone, making light of the attack or minimizing the alleged attacker's links to the far right. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin used the attack to set up an applause line at a rally. Listen, Speaker Pelosi's husband, they had a break-in last night in their house and he was assaulted. There's no room for violence anywhere, but we're

going to send her back to be with him in California. That's what we're going to go do. That's what we're going to go do. That's what we're going to go do. The former president's son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted a photo of a pair of underwear and a hammer captioned, Got My Paul Pelosi Halloween Costume Ready. And Senator Ted Cruz quoted a thread calling the attacker, who appears to have authored a blog embracing anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, calling him a hippie nudist from Berkeley. A poll by the COVID States Project earlier this year asked Americans whether violence was ever justifiable against the government.

Nearly one in four said either definitely or probably. Nearly one in five Republican men said it was justifiable right now. Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told NPR at the time that the results were not surprising. It's moved from the sphere of chest pumping into the sphere of reality. And it's affecting election workers, volunteer poll workers, school boards, you know, really the theories about the vote as part of his campaign to remain in office, election workers have become targets of vitriol and harassment. A poll by the Brennan Center for Justice earlier this year found one in six local election officials said they had been personally threatened. And federal authorities and domestic extremism experts are worried about the possibility of political violence around the midterms. My colleague

Elsa Chang spoke with NPR's Odette Youssef and Miles Parks about what they're watching. Odette, I want to start with you. I mean, just how concerned is law enforcement right now about the threat of violence during this election? Well, Elsa, just some context first. You know, we've been building to this concern for years. One really shocking statistic is that in 2021, the Capitol Police reported 9,600 direct or indirect threats against members of Congress. And that's more than 10 times what it reported in 2016. But on Friday, several federal agencies circulated an internal bulletin specifically focused on the risks around these midterms. And the bulletin said that extremists pose a heightened threat during this election cycle, most likely from what it calls lone offenders, motivated by this now widespread belief on the right that U.S. elections are corrupt and also motivated by certain hot button social issues like abortion

and LGBTQ rights. And targets of this violence could range from candidates to elected officials to voters and could take place at places like Dropbox, campaign events, and more. And Odette, when you talk about threats, is law enforcement pointing to like general vitriol online, or are there specific targeted plans for violence that they're focusing on? Well, so far, we're not hearing about specific or coordinated plans. But we are seeing a couple of things that are concerning. First, again, this widespread belief in election fraud combined with the potential calls to violence, which have become, frankly, much more common these last two years. The second concern is about voter intimidation.

You know, Elsa, Arizona has become sort of the poster child of this recently because some people were posting up with weapons in tactical gear at drop boxes, ostensibly to monitor voters. And I'll also add, you know, Odette mentioned this idea of this lone offender theme when it comes to violence, but ballot box monitoring and election monitoring is not happening randomly. You know, Republicans nationally over the past two years have really been pushing for this sort of citizen oversight over elections. We saw this a little bit after the 2020 election, but they've really built an infrastructure aimed at pushing this sort of oversight. We're hearing this from candidates at the Secretary of State level,

and also in places, far right places like Steve Bannon's podcast, pushing people to kind of do this sort of monitoring. Okay, so Odette, what should we be looking for as we move closer to Election Day? Well, I spoke to Shannon Hiller about this. She's with the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton. And interestingly, she says she's actually feeling pretty good about how things will go on Election Day itself. Even if we look back to 2020, we saw very little violence around Election Day itself. There was lots of preparation and has been even more preparation by government, non-government groups to ensure that that's the case this year again. So Elsa, the bigger concern really is the period after voting day. Hiller said she's going

to be keeping a close eye on places like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that are really charged politically, especially if election results are delayed due to recounts or litigation. Okay, so potentially bracing for something. But Miles, what are we hearing from voting officials on all of this? Well, we're hearing a lot about poll monitors, people who want to be poll watchers who believe conspiracies that the elections are stolen. And that kind of puts local election officials in a little bit of a bind. You know, on one hand, this could be a really good opportunity to educate some of these people and potentially bring them out as some of these conspiratorial rabbit holes about elections.

But also, it can be kind of a powder keg if people who are actually involved in the mechanisms of elections believe there is fraud and want to do things to try to, you know, find that fraud. I talked about that with Spencer Overton, who's a voting expert at George Washington University. It's not about service. It's not about volunteering, but it's about political activism and vindicating an election from a couple of years ago, that can result in real conflict. All of this can also have this effect of voter intimidation that Odette mentioned earlier. You know, even in the many places where these sorts of things aren't happening, voters are seeing headlines about them and potentially could say, oh, no, you know, maybe I won't go cast my ballot just because I don't want to bother with the trouble.

Right. Well, Odette, we've been talking all along about concern around this midterm election that said midterms are at least historically less charged than presidential elections. So I'm wondering, like, are extremism experts already looking ahead to 2024? Yes. I mean, many of them have been calling these midterms a dry run for 2024, Elsa, in terms of testing what people will be able to get away with when it comes to confronting people at voting booths or at polling stations. But you know, they also say it could be a dry run for people who want to protect democracy too. So you know, law enforcement, government institutions,

everyone committed to protecting our democratic norms. That's NPR's Odette Youssef and Miles Parks speaking with my colleague Elsa Chang. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.