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Political violence researchers are not expecting a repeat of the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Instead, many say election-related violence is more likely to happen in local communities. Civil society organizations have quietly begun preparing. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef reports.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: In February, Rachel Kleinfeld invited about 100 political violence researchers onto a call. She asked them first to talk about what they know.
RACHEL KLEINFELD: Every single number is elevated - from hate crimes, political homicides, people driving into protesters - you name it. If it's a kind of political violence, it's been going up since 2015.
YOUSEF: Kleinfeld is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace. She says the group then turned to what could happen around the election. The period she worries about the most is the one that begins after the polls close, especially if it takes long to tally the votes.
KLEINFELD: There are a small number of counties within states that are counting late. For instance, Pennsylvania can't start counting absentee ballots till the day of the election. And if we again get more Democrats voting by absentee, you could have it looking going - like it's going red and then moving blue. That's the kind of nightmare scenario but very likely.
YOUSEF: The concern is that a scenario like this creates a window for narratives to circulate about vote tampering or other nefarious play, and that could raise the risk of armed mobilizations. But in the last three years, civil society organizations have been ramping up efforts to defuse these situations well before they get to that point.
NEALIN PARKER: If you do work ahead of time that depolarizes and do work with influencers, where they are able to get clear information from trusted sources early enough, then you are able to in-group influence.
YOUSEF: Nealin Parker heads one of those organizations. It's called Common Ground USA. When Parker talks about influencers, she's not talking about the social media kind. Her group has focused on swing states, working with real-life influencers - respected leaders from the faith, business and elected communities. The goal is to shore up what they call local resiliency. That is, giving those influencers early warning and support when outsiders are targeting their community with disinformation and division to create a crisis - kind of like what happened in Springfield, Ohio, where false claims about Haitians inflamed divisions and led to bomb threats.
PARKER: If you can immediately get people to respond and say, your spaghetti's not sticking, like, this is not going to work here and this is not going to work now, that's what you're looking to build, and a lot of that is behind-the-scenes work.
YOUSEF: It's also difficult work, especially when the spaces that used to promote community dialogue have been targeted in the so-called culture wars.
JILL GARVEY: And that's, I think, why you see authoritarian movements go after libraries. You see them go after schools. You see them go after the YMCA.
YOUSEF: Jill Garvey is co-director of a non profit called States at the Core, or STAC, which helps communities resist authoritarianism.
GARVEY: Because once they sort of shut those places down or make them scary or places where people don't want to engage, you see a lot more polarization happening.
YOUSEF: NPR spoke with more than a dozen researchers, nonprofit and foundation leaders who are engaged in this work. All of them see the lights flashing red during this election period. Many worry that dwelling on the scary stuff could make people feel powerless. But Nealin Parker says everyday people can and should see their agency in correcting course.
PARKER: Most of the interactions that most people in this country will have over the next month are not with radicalized people. They are with people where you can walk away from the precipice, and you should engage in those conversations to do that.
YOUSEF: Odette Yousef, NPR News.
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