The Risk Of Lone-Wolf Terror At The Polls

The word “militia” implies an organized paramilitary group, and in the United States, those groups are usually right-wing. But the groups the term is applied to aren’t as cohesive as the word implies — they’re often wildly disorganized, predominantly online communities of individuals whose ideologies may not align beyond a general pro-gun stance and a sense that only they can save America.

That matters on Election Day because experts in these groups told me that voter intimidation and violence at the polls is far more likely to come in the form of scattered lone-wolf incidents than any kind of widespread, organized assault by a named militia group like the Proud Boys.

In some ways, this is good news: It means most Americans don’t need to fear voting, and if there is violence in one place, it’s unlikely to indicate a larger trend. But it also means that dealing with these threats is trickier than it might be if there were organized groups to track. Some states are more at risk than others — take Michigan, for example, where a small group of unaffiliated paramilitians has been charged with planning to kidnap the state’s governor. And there’s been a shift in recent years as these people, long associated with anti-government ideologies, have aligned themselves with Trump as the leader of both the government and the anti-government. Policing these groups is also complicated by the fact that there’s often overlap between these online communities and law enforcement. The reality is that, in a violent incident, Americans may be relying on protection from people who personally know the instigators.