Trump Dismisses Potential for Violence as Polling Places Are Hit With Bomb Threats
After nearly four years of interminable rallies, 34 felonies, one last-minute candidate switch, two assassination attempts, and several months of crippling anxiety, the national fever dream of the 2024 campaign season has reached its end. Election Day is upon us.
Voters across the nation are lining up at their polling places on Tuesday after more than 78 million Americans cast their ballots early — a significant decrease from the pandemic-era flood of mail-in, absentee, and early voting that clogged state counts and delayed results for days. Still, the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump is sitting on a razor’s edge, and it could be days before a winner is declared.
The candidates aren’t sitting quietly in the meantime.
“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Tuesday evening, sowing the seeds for a potential challenge of the results. He later wrote, “Philadelphia and Detroit! Heavy Law Enforcement is there!!!”
Seth Bluestein, Philadelphia’s Republican city commissioner, responded that there is “absolutely no truth to this allegation,” calling it “yet another example of disinformation.”
The former president voted in Palm Beach, Florida, earlier in the day alongside his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, and gave a lengthy press conference to reporters in which he claimed he was already in the lead (despite no results having been made public), doubted the security of voting machines, and claimed his supporters “believe in no violence.”
“It won’t even be close,” Trump said of the race, “but it’s gonna take a long time to certify.”
“It looks like we have a very substantial lead,” he added without evidence. “It looks like we have many more Republicans voting today than Democrats. If you have a lead and we have a bigger vote that means you are doing very well.”
When asked if he would discourage his supporters from engaging in election-related violence — as they did in the aftermath of the 2020 election — the former president claimed that his “supporters are not violent people” and that he doesn’t “have to tell them that.”
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The former president’s assertion is already being contradicted by several instances of violence and intimidation by his supporters at polling places. In Texas and Florida, arrests were made after individuals — one who was armed with a machete — menaced poll workers and Democratic voters. Last month, Arizona authorities arrested a man who had repeatedly shot up a Harris campaign office. On Election Day, amid reports of record turnout throughout the country, several states’ election infrastructure were rocked by bomb threats, swatting incidents and other threats. Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Maine were all affected. In several states, authorities linked the threats — which were found to not be credible — to Russian election influence operations.
In Georgia, several polling locations in Democratic areas were forced to pause operations after receiving what officials called “non-credible” bomb threats supposedly linked to Russian influence operations. DeKalb county received bomb threats at five polling locations.
“We’ve heard some threats that were of Russian origin,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Tuesday. “I don’t know how to describe that that’s viable — we don’t think they are, but in the interest of public safety, we always check that out, and we’ll just continue to be very responsible when we hear about stuff like that.”
Multiple polling places in Fulton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties have been granted special permission to keep polls open past the standard closing in order to accommodate for time lost responding to the threats. Fulton Country has dispatched a member of law enforcement to all 117 polling places in the region.
Similar incidents were reported in Michigan, where state Attorney General Dana Nessel said polling locations had received threats that are “serious in nature,” but not credible. The FBI issued a statement confirming that they were “aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains,” and that “none of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”
False threats were also reported in Arizona and Maine. “We have no reason to believe that any of our voters or any of our polling places are in any sort of jeopardy,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said at a Tuesday news conference.
The danger isn’t confined to polling places. Capitol Police announced Tuesday afternoon that they arrested a man with a torch and flare gun trying to enter the Capitol Visitor Center, noting that the man smelled like fuel. Capitol Police Chief Manger J. Thomas Manger said in a press conference that the suspect was carrying a water bottle full of some sort of accelerant, and “had papers with him that he said was his intent to deliver them to Congress.”
State officials and federal authorities have warned that the pressure on poll workers and volunteers may get worse as voters flock to the ballot box. On Monday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner invited anyone who felt that it was time to “play militia” and intimidate voters or volunteers in Pennsylvania to “F around and find out.”
“We do have the cuffs. We do have the jail cells. We do have the Philly juries, and we have the state prisons,” he said. “So if you’re going to try to turn an election into some form of coercion — if you’re going to try to bully people […] we’re not playing. F around and find out.”
Trump is already attempting to undermine confidence in election results. It’s been abundantly clear for years now that the former president will accept no result other than victory, and has been priming the pump to claim fraud and interfere with outcomes since he lost in 2020.
The army of lawyers and Republican poll watchers mobilized by the Republican National Committee was in action early on Election Day. RNC Co-Chair Michael Whatley tweeted on Tuesday morning that the RNC had “deployed our roving attorneys, [and] engaged with local officials,” to ensure that “poll watchers in Philadelphia, York, Westmoreland, Allegheny, Lehigh, Cambria, Wyoming, and Lackawanna Counties,” were allowed to enter polling locations.
Poll watching is a time honored tradition in American elections, but Republican leaders have made clear that they plan to weaponize the practice as part of an effort to build a vigilante army of pro-Trump election monitors who will whistleblow on supposed instances of election fraud. The over 170,000 Republican poll watchers that have been trained for the election are backed by a cadre of GOP lawyers that is already filing dozens of election related lawsuits.
Trump spent the closing days of his campaign in an erratic seesaw between his boilerplate appeals to authoritarianism and exhausted nihilism. During his final campaign rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, the former president described the nation as a wasteland occupied by violent migrants, and warned that states are agents of the federal government who could act against him to foil what he claims is a sure victory.
In her closing message to voters, Harris reiterated her campaign message of inclusivity. “As president, I pledge to seek common ground and common-sense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris told supporters in Philadelphia. “I pledge to listen to people who disagree with me. Because, you see, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy. I’ll give them a seat at the table. That’s what real leaders do. That’s what strong leaders do.”