Primed by Trump, militias gear up for ‘stolen’ US election
With the president weaponising fears of electoral fraud, armed groups are becoming increasingly paranoid
Laura Pullman, New York | Josh Glancy, WashingtonChris Hill is armed and ready for revolution. If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump in November, the former US marine believes the Democrats will have fraudulently won the presidential election, and he will not take it lying down.
“If there’s evidence that the vote was rigged and manipulated, I’d consider that grounds for open rebellion,” said Hill, the leader of the Georgia Security Force Three Percenters, a militia group.
“We’ll take our arms and our counsel and reclaim this country and our rights. If you try to do this at the ballot box and it doesn’t work, you go to the bullets.”
As talk grows in America of a dangerous stand-off after the election on November 3, and Trump escalates claims that it will be a fraud, Hill is ready to face the worst in support of the president. “We’ll go wherever we’re needed. Wherever that flashpoint may be, we’ll be there with sufficient arms, counsel and provisions,” the 45-year-old said from his home near Atlanta.
Hill, whose “codename”, Blood Agent, is tattooed on his arm, dons military fatigues and takes his members on field-training exercises every month. “We go over shit-hit-the-fan scenarios,” said the married father of two, who works as a paralegal. “We do fitness, survival, infantryman skills, military tactics, patrolling, marksmanship, communications and combat lifesaving medical first aid.
“You’ve got to be able to hunt, fish, trap, snare, cultivate crops. You can’t wage war on an empty stomach. Everybody’s always improving on their weaponry. Stocking up so that we have food, water and sufficient ammunition to defend ourselves and our state against government tyranny.”
The group, which is anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-abortion, has protested against the building of a mosque and rallied to protect Confederate cemeteries. Hill’s great fear is a new president treading on his right to bear arms: “If Biden wins and attempts to take away semi-automatic rifles on a national level, there will be blood.”
He claims that in Georgia alone there are about 400 “three percenters” who have at least 1,000 guns and more than 150,000 rounds of ammunition.
A corrupt election will be a “Lexington and Concord moment”, he said, referring to the battles in 1775 at the start of the American War of Independence — the conflict from which his militia draws its name, over a disputed claim that only 3% of American colonists took up arms against Great Britain.
This combustible remix of America’s creation myths is fuelled by a paranoia that flows from Trump. The president has seized on an increase in postal voting due to the lockdown to warn that a vast fraud lies ahead. “Because of mail-in ballots, 2020 will be the most rigged election in our nations history,” he tweeted on Monday. “Rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. It will be the scandal of our times!” he added.
The next day, on the campaign trail in Arizona, Trump told supporters that the vote will be “the most corrupt election in the history of our country and we cannot let this happen”. The president himself is registered to vote in Florida via an absentee ballot and public health experts in his administration have encouraged voting by post. But that has not stopped Trump stoking the fires. He has made 60 false claims about postal ballots since April, according to The New York Times.
The president’s critics debate his motives. Polls indicate that he lags behind Biden by about 10 percentage points after a poorly attended rally in Oklahoma last weekend and the release of a damning memoir by John Bolton, his former national security adviser.
Is he just psyching himself and his supporters for defeat as his poll ratings sag, or more sinisterly laying the groundwork to dispute the election result? Biden has suggested that Trump might refuse to leave the White House if he lost. “It’s my greatest concern, my single greatest concern. This president is going to try to steal this election,” he said this month.
Peter Nicholas, a political writer for The Atlantic magazine, pointed out in an article this month that Trump was a persistent rule-breaker and asked: “Would he honour one of the nation’s most precious norms — the peaceful transfer of power — if it meant admitting failure?”
The nightmare some envisage begins on election night. Although the arithmetic is complex — thanks to the number of states and their weighted importance in the electoral college system — a winner usually begins to emerge by the time the last polls close on the West Coast. What if, with postal votes more common this year, the counting takes much longer?
“The big concern is that Trump could use the period between election night and the ultimate announcement of winners in each state to claim that there’s fraud and to try to generate the belief that the counting is somehow being done in an unfair way,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine and author of Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy. Hasen does not believe postal-voting fraud is significant. “If you look at the overall number of cases they’re low and very few are actually conspiracies to try and steal the election as opposed to a single individual casting a ballot belonging to a family member or something like that,” he said.
Unquestionably, however, Trump’s alarms about postal voting cut through to his fans and the militia groups. “It’s self-evident that on the left they just want to win — they don’t care how. It’s not who casts the votes that matters it’s who counts them, right?” said Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, former service personnel who see themselves as guardians of the constitution.
Rhodes, 55, and his members plan to patrol polling stations on November 3 in an effort to stamp out suspicious behaviour. “We’ll go undercover and look for people we think are committing voting fraud,” said the airborne veteran and Yale Law School graduate, who lives in Montana. “We’re looking for indicators that they’ve got people who aren’t US citizens voting; then we can go and suppress that behaviour by letting it be known that we’re watching. We’ll videotape them and turn it over to law enforcement.”
He added: “If Biden wins, I think a civil war is very likely because what do you do when you’ve got millions of people who reject our history, reject our constitution and want to impose Marxism on the country. We’re heading for conflict.”
In this world of far-right patriot groups, theories that the liberal billionaire George Soros owns the company that runs the voting machines, and can therefore fix the election result, are rife. They cite other culprits for election interference too: antifa (far-left anti-fascists), Black Lives Matter activists and illegal immigrants.
“The whole world view of the militia movement is based on conspiracy theories so it’s very easy for them to believe an election would be rigged to make sure a Democratic candidate, or just an establishment candidate, won,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Centre on Extremism. “It requires no mental reach at all for them.”
Pitcavage believes, however, that militia groups are unlikely to rise up violently after a Trump defeat. “Given the patterns of domestic violence over the past 25 years we’d be far more likely to find isolated incidents of violence by lone individuals, small informal groups or people breaking off from formal organised groups to do something more radical or violent,” he said.