In the final days of his election campaign, US Republican candidate Donald Triumph has been repeating that if he loses Tuesday’s election it is because Democrats cheated, stoking fears of a violent response to any potential victory for Vice President Kamala. Harris. As a result, ten states have placed their National Guard units on alert to quell unrest.

Trump once told rally attendees that he “should never have left the Oval Office” in 2021, when he incited his supporters to march on the Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in what turned out to be a deadly battle. attempted insurrection. After nearly four years of challenges and legal investigations, no evidence has been found to support Trump’s claim of a “stolen” election.

With nationwide polls predicting a tie in this year’s race and false and manipulative social media posts fanning the flames, tensions have never been higher; and Americans are bracing for a repeat of the chaos of the last presidential election.

The Harris campaign said in an interview with ABC News last week that they are preparing for the possibility that Trump will prematurely claim victory before all the votes are counted, as he did in 2020.

“Unfortunately we are prepared if he does, and if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and trying to manipulate the consensus of the American people… we are prepared to respond,” Harris said, outlining a basic plan for social media. ask for calm in that case.

Other topics of interest

Accept Trump and get to Mars? No deal.

As a sweetener in his bid for re-election, former President Trump is offering to send a mission to Mars, but we won’t reach the Red Planet in a launch from the ruins of the free world.

“This is sowing the seeds for attempts to overturn an election. We saw it in 2020, and I think the lesson that Trump and his allies have learned since then is that they have to plant these ideas early,” Kyle Miller, a strategist at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told Reuters.

While pushing an angry, anti-immigration agenda, Trump’s allies have sounded the alarm that non-U.S. citizens have flooded the polls with their illegal votes. At least one study by the Brennan Center for Justice found only 30 confirmed cases of these illegal votes out of 23.5 million votes it reviewed after the 2016 election, and made no mention of whether the votes went to Trump (who won that choice). or by his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Non-existent nuns in Pennsylvania, Republican operative falsely claims

In one famous case in late October, an ardent Trump supporter and Republican pollster was going door-to-door in the swing state of Pennsylvania and noticed what he thought was an empty building where dozens of voters were registered. He reported on social media that no one lived at that address, proving these conspiracy theories.

As it turned out, the building was inhabited by about 50 Benedictine nunsand the sisters who manned the front desk said that this guy Cliff Maloney (whose inflammatory post accusing the organization of voter fraud received about 3 million views on X) never knocked on the door. The sisters said they were considering legal action against the Republican operative as a result.

“Being wrongfully accused of voter fraud is really disgusting and ugly,” said Sister Stephanie Schmidt, the prioress. Washington Post.

In another case, focusing on another swing state, Georgia, a video purporting to show non-U.S. citizen Haitians lining up to vote for the president of the United States went viral last week. To no one’s surprise, this also turned out to be false, and in an even less surprising development, US officials from several agencies determined last week that the video campaign was the work of Kremlin propagandists, part of Putin’s efforts to sow discord. among the American electorate.

Then, in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, Reuters reported, a Republican activist posted a video of someone allegedly leaving a trash can of fake ballots at the county courthouse. The post was viewed around five million times, raising further unfounded suspicions. But, as you may have guessed, the delivery was actually made by a U.S. postal worker, “literally just delivering the mail,” said Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt.

Trump, however, took the opportunity to capitalize on the since-debunked allegations, saying in a social media post last Thursday, “We Caught THEM MAKING BIG DECEPTIONS in Pennsylvania” and demanding criminal prosecutions.

Burned and stolen ballots in Democratic-leaning districts

In fact, some electoral malpractices have been documented in the United States during this election season, although the incidents occurred in liberal-leaning areas of the Pacific Northwest and Florida.

Last week, hundreds of ballots were burned in two ballot boxes in the states of Washington and Oregon, which voted overwhelmingly against Trump in 2016 and 2020. Investigators are still searching for a suspect they believe is responsible for both incidents.

Nearly all of the burned ballots in a ballot box in Vancouver, Washington, were destroyed, while most of the ballots in a ballot box in Portland, Oregon (close to Washington state, both geographically and politically) survived a fire. caused the same day, election officials said. The incidents are believed to be related, reports cited by state officials said.

Meanwhile, in Democratic-dominated Miami-Dade County, Florida, a civilian I found a box and a bag of early voting ballots lying in the middle of the street. The driver returned the ballots to a police station and nothing was tampered with in the box or bag, according to election staff.