THREATS AGAINST ELECTION WORKERS, OFFICIALS GROW
Calls, emails and letters depict or call for violent acts
In his urgent demand Monday that President Donald Trump condemn his angry supporters who are threatening workers and officials overseeing the 2020 vote, a Georgia elections official focused on an animated image of a hanging noose that had been sent to a young voting-machine technician.
“It’s just wrong,” the official, Gabriel Sterling, a Republican, said at a news conference. “I can’t begin to explain the level of anger I have over this.”
But the technician in Georgia is not alone.
Across the nation, election officials and their staff have been bombarded this month with emails, telephone calls and letters brimming with menace and threats of violence, the result of their service in a presidential election in which the defeated candidate’s most ardent followers have refused to accept the results.
The noose may be approaching meme status among the recipients of the abuse. Amber McReynolds, head of the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit that promotes voting by mail, said she had experienced a spike in online threats since Nov. 3, when Trump ratcheted up false claims that fraudulent mail votes had cost him the election. One serial harasser on Twitter, she said, has been especially venomous.
“He sent me a picture of a noose and said ‘You’re a traitor to the American people,’ ” she said. “All because I run a nonprofit that tries to make voting by mail easier and more secure."
“I personally have gotten 10 or 12 of those — emails with the nooses, images of people who have been hung,” said the chief election official of one Western state, who refused to be named for fear of drawing even more threats. “They don’t reference anything you’re doing wrong. They’re just, ‘This election was stolen. We know you had something to do with it. We’re going to come for you.’ ”
That official, like some others, said the threats had been sent not just to highranking officials whose profiles have been raised by news media interviews but to comparatively unknown members of their staffs.
Officials in some states refused to confirm threats against their election workers, worrying that acknowledging them would only make the problem worse. But published reports of election-related threats and harassment have risen steadily in recent weeks.
Among the targets, according to interviews and news reports, are officials in battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, as well as election officers in less contested states like Virginia, Vermont and Kentucky.
In Philadelphia, an aide to a Republican city commissioner was bombarded with abuse shortly after the Nov. 3 vote after a Trump supporter, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, singled him out at a broadcast news conference. Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, said last month that she and her family received “utterly abhorrent” death threats after former Vice President Joe Biden won the state’s electoral votes.
David J. Becker, director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that seeks to improve election administration, said he knew of election officials and their families in a half-dozen states who had been forced to ask for police protection and even move out of their homes because of violent threats.
“These threats are frightening,” he said. “These threats often go into areas related to race or sex or antiSemitism. More than once they specifically refer to gun violence.
“These people are public servants,” he added. “Disturbing is not a word that comes close to what they are experiencing right now.”