Election officials bombarded with threats over vote results
WASHINGTON — 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 votingmachine 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. Far from it.
Across the nation, election officials and their staff have been bombarded in recent weeks 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 organization 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 high-ranking officials whose profiles have been raised by news media interviews but to comparatively unknown members of their staffs.
They are the poisonous fallout of an election in which Trump has stoked baseless claims of election fraud on a daily basis, his lawyers have peddled conspiracy theories, and supporters have called for extralegal actions with the goal of keeping Trump in power.
The president’s attorney general, William Barr, said Tuesday that the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have overturned the results in an election that Trump lost by a 306-232 margin in the Electoral College and almost 7 million votes.
Officials in some states refused to confirm threats against their election workers, worrying that acknowledging them would only make the problem worse.