Election workers taking solace in indictments
May finally get justice for their harassment
Tonya Wichman has overseen elections in a rural Ohio county for eight years and hasn’t experienced any significant problems with voting or counting the ballots. But that doesn’t mean no big worries at all.
What does concern her is the frequent harassment, intimidation and even physical threats she and her staff have been receiving since the 2020 election. It got so bad ahead of the 2022 midterms that her staff got police protection when leaving or coming to the office.
That’s why she was interested in the indictment this week of former President Donald Trump and 18 others charged in an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Among many charges, the indictment names several people accused of a harassment campaign that led to death threats against two Atlanta election workers.
It marks the highest-profile effort yet to hold people accountable for targeting state or local election officials, many of whom have left their jobs after facing political pressure or threats from those who falsely believe the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
“It’s nice to know that people are
listening,” said Wichman, a Republican who is the election director in Defiance County, where Trump won over 67 percent of the vote in 2020.
“We understand the First Amendment and the right to free speech, but harassing poll workers and harassing election officials, intimidating their families, it’s just wearing down on people and causing good people to leave their jobs,” she said. “It’s been unsettling across the country.”
Election worker intimidation is one key element of the conspiracy alleged in the Georgia case. Tuesday’s
indictment alleges that several of the defendants falsely accused Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman of committing election crimes and says some defendants traveled from out of state to harass and intimidate her.
The indictment charges Trump with making false statements and writings in claims he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other state election officials on Jan. 2, 2021 — including that up to 300,000 ballots “were dropped mysteriously into the rolls,” that more than 4,500 people voted who weren’t on registration lists and that Freeman was a “professional vote scammer.”
Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump adviser at the time who also faces charges in the Georgia case, is accused of making several false claims about the vote-counting process at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Prosecutors say he falsely claimed that county election workers stationed there had kicked out observers and then “went about their dirty, crooked business,” illegally counting as many as 24,000 ballots. He also said three election workers — Freeman, her daughter Wandrea “Shaye”
Moss and an unidentified man — were passing around USB ports “as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” to infiltrate Dominion voting machines.