As we approach the presidential election next month, our election sites and officials may be in considerable physical danger — and the safety of the ballots and the integrity of the vote count could also be at risk.
Over the past four years, an alarming number of election officials and workers nationwide have been intimidated or threatened by people who appear to believe the widespread lies about voter fraud and rigged voting machines that supposedly helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. Since 2021, the Department of Justice has charged more than a dozen people across the country with threatening election workers. President Biden said on Friday that while he was confident that the election would be “free and fair,” he was not sure that it would be “peaceful.”
The good news is that local officials and the Justice Department have taken some steps to address the problem. There are sporadic reports of election directors in this or that town who have increased security, for instance by enlisting additional police protection. And last month Attorney General Merrick Garland, citing the “unprecedented spike in threats” against those who administer our elections, announced the convening of a task force to “aggressively investigate and prosecute threats” to election workers.
The bad news is that these commendable efforts are not enough. Election officials are not law enforcement professionals; they lack the resources to adequately provide for their own security. And while federal prosecution is essential, it is not the same thing as protection.
State governors, especially in the seven swing states, need to provide more for the physical security of election workers and the ballots themselves, not just on Election Day but also through the tabulation of the vote and its certification by Congress on Jan. 6, 2025. If the election is as close as current polls suggest, the destruction of even a small percentage of ballots in a swing state — be it deliberate destruction or inadvertent damage by rampaging protesters — might jeopardize our ability to determine the winner of the election.
In addition to the “unprecedented spike in threats” that Mr. Garland cited, there is other worrisome evidence suggesting the possibility of violence. At the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a research institute that I run at the University of Chicago, we have been conducting quarterly national surveys of Americans’ attitudes toward political violence since the summer of 2021.
In our most recent survey, conducted from Sept. 12 through Sept. 16, we found disturbingly high levels of support for political violence. Notably, this attitude was bipartisan. Nearly 6 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the “use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” A little over 8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that “the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.”
These results reflect a relatively stable pattern over the past year. And in this area, public attitudes can become reality: Historically, the higher the level of support for political violence, the more likely actual political violence is. To be sure, people often have their own unique psychosocial reasons for acting violently. But public support for violence can nudge people to act by making them believe their violent act would be popular (as seems to have been the case, for example, with the would-be assassins of Mr. Trump).
If you’re wondering what “use of force” means to our respondents, for more than half of them it means serious violence. In a special survey we conducted in July after the first Trump assassination attempt, we found that 38 percent of those who supported the use of force against Mr. Trump meant, in so many words, his “assassination,” “murder” or “killing,” while another 30 percent meant Jan. 6-style violent protests or other efforts to overturn a Trump government.
Stolen-election fears were prominent in our most recent survey. We found that about 40 percent of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, about 20 percent of Republicans agree or strongly agree that “the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the certification of the 2020 election results are patriots,” and about 9 percent of Democrats and about 11 percent of Republicans “would attend a protest against an election unfair to my preferred presidential candidate, even if it might turn violent.”
Republican and Democratic governors of the seven swing states should do two things. First, they should make a joint public statement, disseminated widely on video, condemning all political violence — especially violence against election officials and counting facilities — stressing that it is illegal, immoral and anti-American. Just as public support can foster political violence, public condemnation can diminish it.
Second, the governors should order the relevant agencies under their jurisdictions to conduct detailed security assessments of their election sites and provide the resources necessary to ensure their safety. This should include a police presence at precincts on Election Day (while being mindful to avoid anything that feels like voter intimidation) as well as protection for election officials and ballots at centralized tabulation centers during the official counts that follow. To increase the confidence of the public and of election officials, the governors should make some of these security efforts transparent.
If we had not recently witnessed some of the worst election-related violence in modern American history — the Jan. 6 riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the 2022 midterms and the two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump — it might make sense to take more modest precautions. But the past four years have shown that we live in a dangerous new world.
Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
