Man pleads guilty to threatening Michigan official over 2020 election
A week after Joe Biden was elected president, Andrew Nickels of Carmel, Ind., left a voicemail for Rochester Hills, Mich., Clerk Tina Barton in which he said she deserved a “throat to the knife” because she had “frauded out America of a real election.”
An Indiana man pleaded guilty Tuesday to threatening to kill a Michigan elections clerk after the November 2020 election, federal prosecutors announced.
A week after Joe Biden was elected president, Andrew Nickels of Carmel, Ind., left a voice mail for Rochester Hills, Mich., Clerk Tina Barton in which he said she deserved a “throat to the knife” because she had “frauded out America of a real election,” the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Michigan said in a news release.
Barton (R) was one of many election workers across the country who faced threats during and after the 2020 election, when many of President Donald Trump’s supporters claimed the election was fraudulent. Few instances of fraud were found.
Steven Scharg, an attorney representing Nickels, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon. Scharg told the Detroit News that the case shows “how mental health affects so many people.”
Nickels, 37, pleaded guilty to one count of making a threatening interstate communication, according to the news release, and he faces up to five years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced July 9.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Barton called the plea “a win for election officials all over the country.” She added that the threats she received had “permanently impacted me and my family’s lives.”
“I will never be able to turn back the clock and go back to living in a sense of peace and security as I had done prior to this incident,” Barton wrote. “I strongly believe that election officials should never be intimidated, threatened, or harassed for doing their jobs serving the public.”
News of Nickels’s guilty plea came the same day as the presidential primaries in Michigan, where Trump, Biden and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley are competing for the 2024 ballot, another race workers anticipate will bring more unrest.
Three days after the 2020 election, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel asserted that 2,000 Republican ballots in Rochester Hills had been given to Democrats “due to a clerical error.”
In an interview with Bridge Michigan that week, Barton said that there had been an input error but that the correct vote tallies were updated online two days after the election. She also said in a video posted on X that McDaniel’s allegation was “categorically false” and that the error was an “isolated mistake that was quickly rectified.”
When Nickels called
Barton on Nov. 10, he said in his expletive-filled message that “10 million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it,” according to prosecutors. He was indicted last summer.
“No public official should face the violent threats that the victim in this case did, just for doing their job of ensuring the fairness and integrity [of] our federal, state, and local elections,” Dawn N. Ison, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said Tuesday in the news release. “Today’s guilty plea should send a clear message that those who engage in this egregious conduct will be held accountable.”
The plea, Barton wrote on X, was “a reminder that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what political beliefs you hold, if you break the law you will be held accountable for your actions.”