Neo-Nazis, KKK plot to suppress votes nationwide

An early voting place in Potomac, Maryland.

(Image credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Image)

published 2 November 2016

White supremacist groups claim they are mobilizing to suppress and intimidate minorities at the polls on Election Day, and monitors are attempting to sort through what is exaggeration and what is a real threat. "The possibility of violence on or around Election Day is very real," Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center told Politico. "Donald Trump has been telling his supporters for weeks and weeks and weeks now that they are about to have the election stolen from them by evil forces on behalf of the elites."

The supremacists' plans range from the ambitious and unlikely — installing hidden cameras in polling places — to other forms of informal poll watching:

Neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin plans to muster thousands of poll-watchers across all 50 states. His partners at the alt-right website "the Right Stuff" are touting plans to set up hidden cameras at polling places in Philadelphia and hand out liquor and marijuana in the city's "ghetto" on Election Day to induce residents to stay home. The National Socialist Movement, various factions of the Ku Klux Klan and the white nationalist American Freedom Party all are deploying members to watch polls, either "informally" or, they say, through the Trump campaign.The Oath Keepers, a group of former law enforcement and military members that often shows up in public heavily armed, is advising members to go undercover and conduct "intelligence-gathering" at polling places, and Donald Trump ally Roger Stone is organizing his own exit polling, aiming to monitor thousands of precincts across the country. [Politico]

Potok warned that supremacist groups like to talk themselves up, and that voter suppression plots could easily backfire. "If on the morning of Election Day it turns out that we have white supremacists standing around looking threatening at polling places, I think it would arouse anger. People would vote just to prove they're not being intimidated by these radical racists," he said.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.