Driving the news: TheU.S. Conference of Mayors held an event this week warning of decentralized election interference efforts targeting local voters, candidates and election workers.
- “We’ve seen them dismantle some of their nationwide organizations,” said Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and a former Justice Department prosecutor.
- “So the Proud Boys dismantle nationally in favor of state chapters — the Three Percenters did the same,” she told the mayors.
- The change began after the 2020 election and grew more pronounced after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack.
State of play: “We’re seeing similar types of threats today” as in the 2020 elections, McCord said — but now the attacks are coming from a “very ground-up, localized effort.”
What extremists are saying: “Focus on county over country. Capture your local county, then several of them, then maybe your state,” McCord said, quoting from a post on right-wing social network Gab.
In one tactic, extremists are signing up as poll watchers and workers, trying to use legitimate means to infiltrate and disrupt elections.
- A Proud Boy who worked at the polls in Miami in an August primary exhorted group members to do the same during the midterms, telling them: “We need to be at every polling station this November and have eyes and truth-telling patriots monitoring on the ground,” McCord said.
- “Some of the responses were, ‘It’s time for mortal combat,'” she said. “That’s the kind of rhetoric around some of the poll-watching activity.”
- In one high-profile voter intimidation episode, armed vigilantes in tactical gear were seen watching over a Mesa, Arizona, mail-in ballot drop box.