How to Tell If the Election Will Get Violent

Or armed people might attempt to take over election administration centers or recount centers to try to move the needle in their favor. In 2000, Republican operatives descended on an office at the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections, where canvassers were recounting ballots, in what became known as the “Brooks Brothers riot.” No one died, but people were punched and kicked.

Still, there are a number of reasons to think this election won’t get violent. In most countries, violence tends to take place before elections, not after. So if we’re not seeing widespread violence now, we might be in the clear.

Another thing protecting America is its wealth. Rich countries tend not to devolve into civil war because the costs of rioting for everyday people are too high. People might get angry for a weekend, but on Monday, they’ll feel obligated to show up for their well-paying accounting jobs.

What’s more, the number of people who are actually in a militia or another extremist group is still quite small. Some of those who are members, such as the Oath Keepers, like to pride themselves on not shooting first. The federal government is much more aware of homegrown terrorism than it was even a few years ago, and has devoted more funding to combatting it.

Mass violence, meanwhile, is usually organized by a large group, says Sarah Birch, a political-science professor at King’s College London. “No individual by themselves can lead to any type of mass phenomenon,” she says. “One individual is a little sack of blood and bones.”

If today’s would-be terrorists need another reason to remain nonviolent, they could look to past American terrorists, some of whom now say they don’t think their tactics worked. To Bakke, bombings no longer seem like an effective strategy. Looking back, “I don’t think we convinced any thinking person, ‘These kids are right,’” she told me.

Violence isn’t preordained. Over and over, experts told me that the best thing leaders can do to prevent violence is to accept the results of an election unequivocally.

If the ballots are still being counted days after November 3, people who have any credibility with the right could try to remind people that, ultimately, we’re all in this together. In the event that the election gets messy, a Fox News personality could urge people to stay calm and stay home.

In its work to defuse violent extremism, the organization Moonshot CVE focuses on citizenship-related messages. “‘We are all citizens of the same country, even if we have these fundamentally different views.’ Rhetorically, it lands really well with both the left and the right,” Micah Clark, a Moonshot program director, told me. “It’s one of the few things that does anymore.”

Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.