The 2024 presidential election is creating major safety concerns for election officials, poll watchers, activists, and marginalized communities. For months, the Department of Homeland Security has been warning election officials nationwide about the potential for right-wing violence on and around Election Day. DHS has flagged efforts by right-wing extremists to incite attacks on election infrastructure, which could include bombing ballot dropboxes, lone-wolf attacks on election facilities, or the assassination of lawmakers. On November 5, 200,000 volunteers from Donald Trump’s campaign will deploy across the country to monitor polling places and “establish the battlefield” for a contested election. These volunteers have been tasked with gathering the “evidence” that was missing during Trump’s previous attempt to overturn the election. Given that Trump, JD Vance, and Trump’s bouncy, billionaire fanboy Elon Musk have been aggressively promoting conspiracy theories about immigrants voting illegally, this surveillance effort will likely target Black and brown people who Trump supporters perceive as foreign. That targeting will almost certainly result in voter intimidation and could lead to violence. Hoaxes about migrant communities, amplified by Donald Trump and JD Vance on the campaign trail, have already resulted in bomb threats against schools, hospitals, and government buildings in Springfield, Ohio. Unfortunately, these threats will not be confined to Election Day, as pro-Trump forces are primed to use lawsuits and new election rules in some states to create delays, sow doubt, and produce spaces of contestation.
The severity of these threats highlights the need for electoral safety planning among movement groups and organizations. To explore these concerns, I recently spoke with Che Johnson-Long, the Community Safety Education Coordinator with Vision Change Win (VCW). Che is a queer community organizer and security practitioner. She develops community safety curricula, coaches left movement organizations and coordinates VCW’s safety and security programmatic offerings. Most activists have never engaged in electoral safety planning.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kelly Hayes: What is electoral safety planning?
Che Johnson-Long: Honestly, it’s not all that different from safety planning. I think any left movement group should be doing some regular assessment of safety threats and then creating protocols that help groups safeguard against those threats. That can mean anything from creating internal protocols about how you share documents and when to developing a safety team whenever you have internally coordinated events. So safety planning in general, I think, is just groups being able to regularly assess risk and then create plans to intervene.
Electoral safety planning means considering that, while we do this regular safety planning, election season creates a unique hodgepodge of threats, and the political landscape changes really rapidly. Threats often get amplified before national elections and sometimes local elections. Electoral safety planning means thinking about the work that you do in relationship to elections, but then also just thinking about the political landscape that we swim in regardless of how you interact with elections.
Groups that do 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) work have to consider the ways that compliance laws might impact them and protect their groups from acting out of compliance, which can lead to IRS audits. That means making sure that they’re clear on the difference between (c)(3) work and (c)(4) work. For some groups, it means making sure that they have a strong plan for what information canvassers might have access to and then how to remove those access points once they’re done canvassing.
I think electoral safety planning is for everybody, including groups that don’t believe in or participate in national elections. A more emboldened far-right impacts all of our left movement groups. When there are more counter-protesters at our actions and more threats to verify online, all of our safety plans should take that into account.
What are some of the potential threats that organizers are concerned about in the run-up to this election?
We’re seeing a lot of targeting of our communities. The GOP has been spending a ton of money to create these targeted ads that are really, I think, trying to create a transphobic political landscape. They’ve spent $17 million to highlight moments when Harris has expressed support for gender-affirming care, and we know what that is, right? We know that it’s an attack on Democrats, but more importantly, it’s an attack on trans people.
I think these national elections always embolden the far right. We’ve heard of threats that different far-right groups, like the Proud Boys, are making on their website to target drop boxes and some polling locations. They’ve been making these threats since the summer, so they’re not new, and we saw similar things in 2020.
Voter suppression and election denial can also create safety threats that actually go beyond Election Day or the ballot box. For example, the Georgia Board of Elections, which is Republican-run, has this new rule about Georgia hand-counting ballots, and it’s being disputed in court right now. [Author’s Note: Georgia’s hand counting rule has been enjoined by Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney.] In 2020, there was a similar hand-counting rule........