Election

Axios -  An overwhelming majority of registered voters — 76% — are concerned about violent attempts to overturn the results of the 2024 election, Axios' Sam Baker writes from a new AP-NORC poll out today. That includes a majority of Republicans, though Democrats are significantly more worried about post-election violence.

66% of voters said they don't think former President Trump will accept the results if he loses — compared to 22% who said the same about Vice President Harris. Even if there isn't violence after Election Day, two-thirds of voters said they're concerned about state or local officials trying to prevent the election results from being certified. 73% said they're worried about efforts to overturn the election through the legal system. Read the poll

CNN - Federal authorities are investigating fires at ballot boxes in Oregon and Washington after hundreds of ballots were destroyed. Evidence from the incendiary devices found at two charred ballot boxes in the Portland, Oregon, area shows the fires are connected, as well as a third incident reported in Vancouver, Washington, on October 8, a spokesperson for the Portland Police Bureau said. Authorities are working to determine the motives behind the attacks that appear "targeted and intentional," the department added. The fires come after the FBI and Department of Homeland Security recently issued a bulletin raising concerns that "election-related grievances," such as a belief in voter fraud, could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence in the weeks before and after the November election.

NBC News -In the nearly four years since former President Donald Trump claimed the 2020 election was stolen, creating chaos, an array of new guardrails have been put into place. Legal experts say those changes would make another attempt to overturn the result of the election much more difficult and unlikely. 

First and foremost, Trump is no longer president and does not have the power of the executive branch at his disposal.

If Trump attempted to overturn the election result in Congress, he'd be up against the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act. The law, passed in 2022, tightened the process to cast and count electoral votes, gave federal courts a clear role to quickly resolve disputes and made it more difficult for lawmakers to raise frivolous objections. In this scenario, a multi-step process to overturn the results would require compliance from both chambers of Congress, as well as state legislatures. And if all those political pieces fell into place, Trump and his organizers would still have to face the Supreme Court.  

Matthew Sanderson, an election lawyer based in Washington, D.C., said he finds it "incredibly hard to believe" that such a scenario would play out until its end. Beyond Congress, efforts to delay certifying election results on a local level would likely fizzle out, legal experts said. And already, some efforts by pro-Trump groups to challenge how votes are counted and certified have failed, including in Georgia.

Despite all the legal obstacles, some still fear the effect of Trump's rhetoric about a protracted post-election crisis, especially among armed groups.  More