Active shooter drills, combat training conducted ahead of polls

“That’s what we need because they’re going to be cheating,” he said at a rally in Virginia this month, in reference to Democrats.

Meanwhile, poll workers and election officials continue to face growing threats and harassment as a result of election denialism in the US.

Last week, for instance, an Ohio man was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for threatening to kill Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, when she was serving as Arizona’s Secretary of State – the person in charge of administering elections – in 2022.

This came merely weeks after a man from Massachusetts was sentenced to 3.5 years jail for threatening to bomb Hobbs’ office in February 2021.

Arizona was one of the most closely contested electorates in the 2020 presidential election, with Biden winning it by less than half a percentage point.

Republican legislators in that state then spent six months and $US6.5 million ($10 million) unsuccessfully trying to uncover evidence of a stolen election, and at least 11 people with ties to Arizona have been charged for their roles in the US Capitol attack.

But it is by no means the only state where election workers have suffered violence or harassment. The Department of Justice says it is currently investigating dozens of reports of threats against election workers and have charged about 20 people.

Among them was a man arrested last month in New Mexico for helping a defeated state Republican candidate, Solomon Peña, to carry out drive-by shootings at the home of Democrat officials.

“We saw a child awakened from her sleep telling her mother that a spider was crawling on her face, when in reality it was debris falling from bullets flying through her bedroom,” said John Keller, from the Department of Justice’s Election Threats Taskforce.

“The normalisation of personal threats and attacks on government officials and their families is contributing to an election environment in which people are committing previously unthinkable crimes – and the violence is not just hypothetical.”

New Mexico has now joined at least 20 other states that have banned guns at polling places and ballot drop boxes ahead of November’s election.

But authorities are also concerned about the misinformation and conspiracy theories that fuel much of the attacks.

Experts say this is likely to worsen this year due to the explosion of accessible generative AI tools, which allows people to create “deepfake” images, video, audio, and text.

This has already played out in the US presidential primary races: in January, a robocall mimicked Joe Biden’s voice and urge thousands of New Hampshire voters not to cast their ballots in the state’s primary on the false claim that it would preclude voters from having their say at the general election in November.

Biden was not officially on the ballot, but won the New Hampshire primary anyway, after locals waged a campaign to “write in” his name on election day to avoid embarrassing the president.

In a bid to tackle misinformation, FBI and intelligence agencies have beefed up their analytical capabilitiesand spent hours scouring the internet with social media teams whose job it is to assess potential foreign or domestic threats.

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But authorities admit there is only so much they can do to counter far-reaching disinformation campaigns.

“We can’t play the game of whack-a-mole to misinformation and disinformation, because something new is going to pop up every day,” says Karen Brinson Bell from North Carolina’s state board of elections.

“So what we’ve really tried to do is focus on what we can do – and that is to tell our story, and the more facts we have out there and the more those facts are known to voters… then they’re more likely to have a better understanding when they do hear mis or disinformation.

“But it’s a long game. It’s not something that’s going to be solved overnight.”