The election was rigged. Democrats are already trying to steal the election from Donald Trump and the results will be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has seeped into parts of the online right. Over the past few weeks, conservative figures from the fringe to the mainstream have been encouraging their followers to declare fraud if the election goes wrong. “Democrats are rigging the 2024 election just like they did in 2020,” right-wing troll and Trump ally Laura Loomer said on the messaging app Telegram earlier this month. “From illegal voter registration in Arizona to widespread mail ballot fraud to encouraging Democrats to flood the ballot box with illegal alien voters, they are laying the groundwork to steal key states.”

Owen Shroyer, far-right host of Infowars, says Democrats will “steal Wisconsin and Michigan.” War Roomhe said on air last week. “I’d say it’s almost guaranteed at this point.” He then moved on to questioning why results might not be available on election night as they were in the years before the rise of mail-in ballots (which take more time to count and process), a common right-wing line aimed at calling for more votes to be counted and processed. The integrity of the election is being questioned. The idea is that it’s supposedly questionable that votes are now taking longer to be counted; as if election fraud was something that could not be done quickly, but had to be carefully ripened like a delicate French cheese.

Even by the standards of the more extreme sections of the right, Loomer and Shroyer are known for saying: ugly and polemical things. Still, many mainstream figures are trying to push more softly the idea that there may have been election security flaws that could have jeopardized the results. Fox News’ Jesse Watters accused Democrats of “trying to make elections less secure” in a segment on his show earlier this month. On Infowars, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that voting machines were changing voters’ ballot choices in a reliably red, mostly rural county in Georgia. “I will work to investigate this matter and ensure the integrity of our elections in Georgia,” he later said.

The allegations fall into several broad categories, ranging from bland attempts to undermine the credibility of the election to outright conspiracy theories: There are voting irregularities that indicate something is wrong, the time it takes to count results is suspiciously long. Democrats are encouraging blatant voter fraud and a conspiracy is afoot allow non-citizens to vote and could potentially influence the election. But there is no evidence that the election was rigged.

Such claims are not surprising, given that the MAGA right seeded election denialism after Trump lost the presidential nomination in 2020. Some sort of “Stop the Steal” remaster has long seemed almost inevitable. It is less clear what the downstream effects will be. Allegations of non-citizen voting have already led to registered voters being mistakenly excluded from the ballot box. As seen in Texasbut other effects are less obvious. intelligence officials I warned They predict there will be violence around the election. So what does that actually look like, especially if Trump loses?

Increasing protests in Washington DC in 2020 culminated in the attack on the Capitol after the start of the new year. January 6 was energized and spurred by right-wing protests against Covid-era quarantines at statehouses in the United States. Around this time in 2020, there was already a protest in DC involving hundreds of MAGA protesters. These served as rehearsals for the big protest.

This time around, nothing like this happened before Election Day. Although last year saw significant activity and activity on the far right, and Trump attracted large crowds at his rallies, this did not reach 2020 levels. a huge moment. A January 6-style event is possible, but it would require a sudden shift in energy and the will to act almost immediately. And such mobilization would have to happen in a world where people see the consequences of January 6 and understand that they may face prosecution and convictions.

The right “cannot create momentum out of thin air,” Hannah Gais, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. Yet even if there is no energy on the streets, there is momentum online to reject Trump’s loss, and that will likely grow. This rhetoric will likely escalate into violence, but not of the Capitol riot variety. Gais is afraid of the increase violent rhetoric Acts of violence spurred by allegations of election fraud could spur unpredictable, isolated incidents of violence across the country, rather than large, organized events like January 6th.

The intelligence community is similarly concerned. On a note, reported by wiredThe Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is concerned about the “increased risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents” that increases with the election season. Analysts saw online discussions about “preparing for future violence against public officials and federal agents,” according to the report. More and more people, especially those on the right, openly dream of subjecting their enemies to violent revenge, and in some cases, like that Actually I’m already doing this

These fantasies are now starting to become reality. Last week a man punched me poll worker after the official asked him to remove his MAGA hat to comply with electioneering laws. Hundreds of ballots were destroyed after ballot boxes were set on fire in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, on Monday.

Other recent incidents of political violence have been more concerning. A man in Pennsylvania earlier this year beheaded federal employee father and called on others to kill federal employees. In a separate incident, a man in Arizona planned a mass attack at a rap concert He is attempting to start a race war before the election. These events happened months ago, before the election was in full swing and people were making false claims of election fraud. If Trump loses on November 5, Loomer, Shroyer, Greene and their ilk are setting the stage for some very dark things to happen.