Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

With turnout expected to be high this year, many voters who only vote sporadically are likely to cast a ballot. But in our survey with Ipsos that tried to answer why millions of Americans don’t vote, we found that people who voted only some of the time were most likely to have reported barriers to voting, such as they or someone in their household standing in line for more than an hour to vote. They were also likelier than those who always vote to say they’d faced trouble getting time off work to vote, and that they were told their name wasn’t on the list of registered voters.

These barriers were also experienced differently by race and age. Black respondents were the likeliest to say they’d had to stand in line for more than an hour, and Hispanic respondents were the likeliest to say they couldn’t get off work to vote or weren’t able to access the polling place. Americans under 35 were also much likelier than older Americans to face structural barriers like these, especially when it came to having trouble getting time off work to vote, missing voter registration deadlines, and not receiving absentee ballots in time.

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.

Voter fraud has been a major focus of disinformation campaigns this election season. The president has also been fixated on the issue, which has helped to legitimize false claims online.

Trump has claimed, for instance, that ballots have been tossed “in a river” and “in a wastepaper basket.” But the incidents he was referring to were not anywhere as sinister as he claimed: One referred to a load of mail that had been lost, then recovered, and included some ballots, while the other referred to a strange case of just nine ballots that seem to be related to a mix-up in envelopes. Trump’s claims have fed into existing disinformation narratives that are stoking fears of election fraud, such as false stories of thousands of ballots being dumped, or robocalls falsely telling voters that voting by mail is dangerous.

For their part, social media sites are ramping up efforts to fact-check, label and/or remove misleading content online during Election Day, but it’s a good reminder to be skeptical of sensational claims that might crop up as tensions run high in the final hours.