Drug-laced letters start tough year for election workers
For the people who run elections at thousands of local offices nationwide, 2024 was never going to be an easy year. But the recent anonymous mailing of powder-filled envelopes to election offices in five states offers new hints of how hard it could be.
The letters, sent to offices in Washington state, Oregon, Nevada, California and Georgia this month, are under investigation by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the FBI. Several of them appear to have been laced with fentanyl; at least two contained a vague message calling to “end elections now.”
The letters are a public indicator of what some election officials say is a fresh rise in threats to their safety and the functioning of the election system. And they presage the pressure-cooker environment election officials will face next year in a contest for the White House that could chart the future course of American democracy.
“The system is going to be tested in every possible way, whether it’s voter registration, applications for ballots, poll workers, the mail, drop boxes, election results websites,” said Tammy Patrick, chief executive for programs at the National Association of Election Officials. “Every way in which our elections are administered is going to be tested somewhere, at some time, during 2024.”
Patrick and other experts said they were confident that those staffing the next election would weather those stresses, just as poll workers soldiered through a 2020 vote at the height of a global pandemic that all but rewrote the playbook for national elections.
But they did not minimize the challenges. Instead, they said, in some crucial ways — such as the escalation of violent political rhetoric, and the increasing number of seasoned election officials who are throwing in the towel — the coming election year will impose greater strains than in any of the past.
By several measures, an unprecedented number of top election officials have retired or quit since 2020, many in response to rising threats and partisan interference in their jobs.
Turnover in election jobs doubled over the past year, according to an annual survey released last week by the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore.
“They feel unsafe,” said Aaron Ockerman, executive director of the Ohio Association of Elections Officials. “They have great amounts of stress. They don’t feel respected by the state or the public. So they find other employment.”
A certain number of departures is normal, and in many cases, experienced subordinates can take over the tasks.
But departures can create collateral damage: Promoting an insider to a top elections job leaves a vacancy to be filled at a time when it is increasingly difficult to recruit newcomers to a profession that is only becoming more stressful. Experts also worry the aura of nastiness and even danger attached to election work will drive away volunteers, many of them older Americans, who are essential to elections in all states except the handful in which residents largely vote by mail.
Each election requires many hundreds of thousands of volunteers to staff polls. At a recent meeting of election administrators, roughly half were “really worried” about recruiting enough help for next year’s elections, said David J. Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C.
Harassment and threats against election officials were widely reported in the months after former President Donald Trump began to claim falsely that fraud had cost him a victory in the 2020 election. But election officials say that the threats have not stopped since then.
The challenges go beyond threats to demands that can make the requirements of the job feel limitless.
In the last year, for example, election offices nationwide have been bombarded with requests, usually from election skeptics and allies of Trump, for millions of pages of public records relating to voter rolls and internal election operations. Similarly, offices in some states were hit this year with challenges to the legitimacy of thousands of voter registrations.
In both cases, the ostensible purpose was to serve as a check on the integrity of the ballot. The practical effect — and sometimes the intent, experts say — has been to disrupt election preparations and, in some cases, to make it harder for some people to vote.