6) How Crises Are Used to Take Control

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Early warning sign: Security incidents or emergencies are used to suspend normal procedures, intimidate participants, or justify permanent changes after the fact.

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Crises in this bucket often spill directly into the certification fights and legal challenges mapped in What Happens After Votes Are Cast, turning shocks at the ground level into leverage in courts and official proceedings.

• Bomb Threats and Denial-of-Service Attacks on Polling Places
  • Targeted bomb threats in key counties (such as DeKalb and Fulton) force evacuations and temporary closures. Even when courts extend polling hours, data show that in‑person turnout in threatened areas can drop significantly, creating localized disenfranchisement without flipping statewide results.
• Security Theater and Intimidation Around Polling
  • Visible "security" measures—heavily armed poll watchers, aggressive law enforcement presence, or repeated threat narratives—can deter turnout in specific communities while providing officials with plausible deniability about intent.
• Emergency Powers, Executive Orders, and Legal Shocks
  • Crises (real or manufactured) are used to justify executive orders and emergency measures that redefine ID rules, mail acceptance, enforcement priorities, or federal‑state control. Once on the books, these tools can be re‑used in future cycles.
• Bomb Threat Remediation and System Design Weaknesses
  • Case studies from Georgia show how reactive, court‑driven responses to threats are often too weak and too late. Dependencies on devices like ballot‑marking machines and brittle logistics create single points of failure that crises can easily exploit.
• Lock-In After the Crisis
  • After a shock, actors move quickly to codify new rules and staffing patterns—through lame‑duck sessions, constitutional amendments, or structural changes—so that temporary advantage becomes durable, even if public attention moves on.
• Rule of Law Nullification and Prerogative State Creation
  • Federal agencies (ICE, CBP, DOJ) systematically violating court orders—96+ documented violations in a single month per federal judges—to signal that legal restraints no longer apply.
  • Creates "prerogative state" zones where agencies operate with impunity, demonstrating to election officials and the public that courts cannot enforce limits on federal power.
  • January 2026 Acceleration: Minnesota chief federal judge documented ICE violated 96+ court orders in January 2026 alone, calling it an "unprecedented assault on rule of law." Judge Patrick Schiltz noted "ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence."‣
  • Lethal Force and Journalist Arrests: Federal agents killed two Americans (Alex Pretti shot 9 times while kneeling defenseless, Renée Good) during Minneapolis immigration protests. DOJ arrested journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort after multiple federal judges refused to issue warrants, forcing grand jury indictment route instead.‣
  • Dual State Framework: Pema Levy invokes Ernst Fraenkel's "dual state" concept—society splits into normative state (law appears intact for most) versus prerogative state (law ignored for regime enemies). This demonstrates to election officials that federal agencies will operate outside judicial control during 2026 midterms.‣

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Many of these tactics follow a recurring sequence: weakening safeguards, flooding and stressing systems, triggering or exploiting crises, and then using the chaos to justify delays, overrides, or permanent rule changes. The six buckets below show where tactics operate in the system, while this sequence describes how they tend to unfold over time.

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