US Is Bracing for Election Unrest. but How High Is the Risk?

• The United States is preparing for civil unrest surrounding the election.
• Election Day itself isn’t as high of a risk as the postelection period, analysts say.
• While the 2022 midterms passed peacefully, tensions are higher during a presidential election.

The turmoil that took place after the last US presidential election has left its mark.

So this time around, as Election Day looms, businesses and governments around the country are preparing in advance — especially if the results are close.

The consensus going into Election Day is that will be the case.

Seven swing states offer multiple avenues for each candidate to win. And the final polls have largely shown the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump as a virtual tie nationally.

Glen Kucera, an executive at Allied Universal, a private security company, told Business Insider that his clientele are concerned enough to seek more resources to protect themselves and their businesses.

“The threat is kind of imminent and everywhere,” Kucera said. “We’re trying to get ahead of the threat.”

In the final stretch before Election Day, it seems like everyone — from voter advocacy groups and election officials to risk management and security companies — is preparing for civil unrest.

“I think what is also now on people’s minds is the emotion, the anger that goes with some of these elections,” Kucera said. “We’re being deployed to try to figure all those imminent threats out and try to protect the public as we go into this election.”

But just how high is the risk?

Election Day isn’t the biggest worry

Election Day itself isn’t likely to be the most high-risk day for unrest because there will be extensive protective measures taken, said Rachel Brown, an expert on violence, hate speech, and civic engagement at Over Zero, which works to deter identity-based violence.

“I wouldn’t expect us to see a high level of organized violence. People should feel safe voting, and if there is any danger, it’s likely to be very highly localized, such as a single person taking action where there seem to be groups trying to mobilize,” Brown said on Friday at a press panel hosted by the National Task Force on Election Crises (NTFEC), a cross-partisan election organization.

That appears to be the case in Washington and Oregon, where authorities are searching for what they say is a lone actor responsible for placing incendiary devices on at least two ballot drop boxes, burning hundreds of ballots. Officials in Clark County, Washington, where some 488 ballots were damaged, said in a press release that they have been in contact with the majority of the voters affected to issue them replacement ballots.

There are protections in place for the voting process, voters, and election workers, Brown said. Voter intimidation is criminal and prosecutable, and locally, voting sites are preparing for any incidents, including swatting attacks, where a fake call is made to law enforcement to trigger an armed response, Brown said.

“Some of the threats that many of us aren’t even thinking about day to day, election officials are working day in and day out to prevent and then respond to,” Chris Crawford, an NTFEC staffer and policy strategist at Protect Democracy, said at the panel. “There are remedies when activities like this arise that election officials can still try to ensure that every person can have their votes submitted and counted.”

The greater risk is likely postelection, when the results may be decided in courts instead of on election night. Then, there’s the waiting game until Congress counts the electoral votes on January 6, followed by the Presidential Inauguration Ceremony on January 20.

Brown said she is “most concerned” about a spike in conspiracy theories and threats to state capitals, vote count locations, and the individuals who oversee them.

Anticipating such unrest after the election, businesses in Portland and other cities have begun boarding up their windows.

“Violence tends to happen to target the process and to contest results,” Brown said. “We know the dates that are relevant in the process and are able to anticipate where that might happen, but in a close election, we could see the use of violence or intimidation to attempt to sway how the results are processed.”

How great is the risk?

Verisk, a data analytics and risk management company, ranked the United States among the five most high-risk countries for civil unrest, which could also lead to extensive insured losses, in the next year. Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and South Africa rounded out the list, with France, Greece, and Spain the riskiest in Europe.

Verisk wrote in an October analysis that election-related violence is rare in the United States and that the January 6 riot in 2021 was “a standout protest event in US history.” The company said the peaceful 2022 midterm elections showed that the threat of civil violence remained comparatively low.

Emotions run higher during presidential elections, however, and the company’s Strikes Riots and Civil Commotion Predictive Model found that the tension and political polarization could reach a boiling point, sparking unrest in urban centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.

“Not only is the underlying SRCC risk higher than in January 2021, the potential for flashpoints to ignite civil unrest is also greater,” Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, said in a press release.

Robert Munks, Verisk’s head of research for the Americas, said that risks may also rise following the election during the certification processes.

“Crucially, the risk of election-related unrest will rise substantially if the outcome of the election is tightly contested,” Munks said, “particularly should Trump lose to Harris.”