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Following Tuesday’s presidential elections, thousands of protesters took to the streets of the United States. The constant results and allegations of voter fraud have incited voters in several cities in the United States.
Videos of the demonstrations bear witness to some violent clashes, with CNN reporting that several of the protesters are armed. On Thursday night, the National Guard helped police break up a riot in Portland.
However, according to USA Today, more than 100 rallies organized in the days leading up to the weekend are planned.
There are many indications that the protesters are mostly Trump supporters, says Tore Wig, a professor in the Department of Political Science at UiO. Many of the protesters belong to militia groups, according to Wig.
“They are not just ordinary Trump supporters, they are more radical,” he told Dagbladet.
Hypocrisy from another world
The official Trump campaign Twitter account wrote on Wednesday that Democrats are trying to steal the election, asking voters to defend the election and defend themselves.
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– The president asks his most loyal voters like you to defend themselves, the campaign wrote.
During the night through Wednesday, voters will also have received a series of emails from the Trump campaign asking people to defend the election.
In Pennsylvania, Trump voters are rallying and demanding that the count be stopped. In Arizona, the opposite is true. Joe Biden is now just over 2.4 percentage points ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona. Trump has provided pieces of leadership in the state’s largest county, Maricop.
– There, his supporters demand that all early votes be counted. This is hypocrisy from an entirely different world, says US expert Eirik Løkke, an advisor to Civita.
Here’s how Trump can get away with it
He believes that the most important thing now is that those who work to count votes are allowed to work without interruption or, in the extreme, what is perceived as threats of the use of violence.
In line with what Trump wants
In several places, however, demonstrations are reported outside polling stations. In Detroit, a large group of Trump supporters gathered in front of an electoral college.
Protesters shouted slogans such as “stop the count,” writes The Hill. According to Forbes, the protesters demanded that they be allowed into the premises, while, according to Insider, clashes broke out between protesters and police outside the building.
Protesters have gathered in front of a TFC Center in Detroit, Michigan, where votes will be counted on Wednesday. The protesters shouted slogans such as “stop counting.” Write The Hill. Video: Twitter.
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– The demonstrations are exactly in line with what Trump wants, which is to incite the followers and then doubt the outcome of the elections, says Tore Wig.
He does not rule out that the demonstrations could lead to chaos.
“It depends on how much violence is used, if someone manages to provoke the other party to fight back and what the public authorities do in the states where it occurs,” he says.
Here’s how Trump can get away with it
Fine count stopped
Now various experts, including at The Guardian, fear that today’s protesters have the same tactics that Brooks Brothers Riot had 20 years ago.
During the famous 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore lost to George W. Bush after 30 days of counting fines in Florida and new rounds in the courtrooms, several Republican protesters demanded that the counting of votes be stopped.
– Angry Trump named Murdoch
The protesters, many of whom were paid by Republican campaign operators, were successful. A fine-tuning of Florida’s ballots was stopped and George W. Bush eventually became president after a Supreme Court decision.
“I’m afraid this time it could be a new Brooks Brothers riot without a suit, with people wearing AR-15s,” Sherrilyn Ifill, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a civil rights organization and law firm, told the Financial Times on Sunday.
Basically bad
Political science professor Jennifer Leigh Bailey at NTNU notes that the details of the demonstrations are not the same today, but there are similarities to the Brooks Brothers Riot.
– People surround the authorities. In 2000, what mattered was the count. Now is the original count. Those outside the polling stations now want to stop the count. It is fundamentally wrong in a democracy. “Now my candidate has received enough votes, so now we will stop,” he says.
Unexpected drama
The votes that are counted last are those that came in the mail and that Trump wants to take to the Supreme Court.
“It is these voices that protesters insist that they should not be counted,” said Leigh Bailey.
Tore Wig also sees few similarities between the protesters of today and 2000, and believes they don’t have the same tactics.
– It doesn’t seem like that now, so they must have done it a little earlier. In Michigan it’s too late, now it’s more about symbolizing, he says.
