Prepping for the worst: Election workers anticipate threats in US vote

‘Gonna be a rough one’: Election workers anticipate threats in US

Washington, DC – Vanessa Montgomery will not return to her role as a voting site manager during this year’s United States presidential election.

Her reason? “It’s just a lot,” she told Al Jazeera, speaking from her home state of Georgia.

The 61-year-old is a veteran of the state’s elections. Since 2015, Montgomery served Bartow County, northwest of Atlanta, directly overseeing a polling site over the last five years. It was her job to make sure voting went smoothly.

But, for many election officials and poll workers, 2020 represented a turning point.

Montgomery was among the many election employees who faced threats — and even violence — as a result of false claims of voter fraud.

Much of those claims were coming from a high-profile source: then-President Donald Trump. In the aftermath of his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump unleashed a deluge of falsehoods that cast doubt on his loss and spurred public scepticism towards how the voting was run.

Fast forward four years, and Trump is once again seeking re-election, as the Republican nominee for the presidency.

But Montgomery will no longer be there to supervise Bartow County’s polling stations. She fears this presidential election will be as tense as the last, particularly since Trump has already begun to sow doubt about the result.

“It might not be, but I do believe it’s gonna be a rough one,” she told Al Jazeera.

‘Before that, I had no fear’

Part of the reason Montgomery has decided to sit out this year’s vote has to do with an incident that unfolded on a dark country road in January 2021.

It was the night of Georgia’s consequential Senate run-off, a race that would decide which political party would control the chamber.

But even after the polls closed, Montgomery’s job was not over. She still had to travel to deliver the ballots to the county election office.

As Montgomery drove with her daughter from the polling site, she noticed a black SUV tailing them. The vehicle was glued to their bumper and nearly ran them off the road.

In a panic, Montgomery and her daughter called the local sheriff’s department and her county’s election supervisor.

They sped into town. Only when they entered a well-lit area did the SUV relent from its pursuit. It disappeared into the night.

Police eventually met up with Montgomery and accompanied her to the election office. She decided not to file a formal police complaint, although the incident was later reported by the Reuters news agency.

“Before that, I had no fear,” Montgomery, an Army veteran, told Al Jazeera. “But that was the scariest. That was scarier than being in the military.”

Initially, Montgomery decided to continue her election work. Her colleagues felt like family, and she felt a sense of duty in facilitating voting — something she considers “a right and privilege”.

She returned for the 2022 midterm elections and Georgia’s primaries this election season, but there was a lingering unease in the air. Montgomery traces it back to the false election claims in 2020.

“There’s a lot more rudeness, more finger-pointing,” she said. As the 2024 vote approached, she felt increasingly disquiet.

“The bigger the election, the more possibility of somebody trying to intimidate you,” she said. “It just makes you take a step back and say, ‘Do I really want to continue to do this?'”

‘When you least expect it, we will kill you’

Across the country, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, Tina Barton had her own brush with election-related violence.

For more than three decades, Barton, a Republican, served in government, eventually landing the role of city clerk. That office required her to administer elections and maintain voter files, among other duties.

But over the years, she had seen tensions rise. There were early signs of discord in the 2000 election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W Bush, a race decided by a few thousand votes in Florida.

Barton also noticed election denialism years later, in 2016. At the time, Green Party candidate Jill Stein pushed for long-shot recounts in three battleground states, including Michigan, after she finished fourth in the presidential race.

As that effort fizzled, Stein decried, “We do not have a voting system we can trust.”

In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams was also defiant after her 2018 gubernatorial loss to Brian Kemp, accusing Republicans of “rigging” the system in their favour, though she acknowledged they were acting within the laws in place at the time.

But those nascent signs of increased scepticism turned into something different following the 2020 vote, Barton said.

“Up to that point, the attack had been more on the process and the doubts on the process and how we do elections in our country,” she told Al Jazeera. “We really hadn’t had the attention on us individually.”

For Barton, that newfound spotlight on election workers came with threats.

After Trump’s defeat in 2020, much of the scrutiny fell on battleground states that Republicans narrowly lost, including Michigan.

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel referred to Barton by name when she falsely claimed that 2,000 votes had been wrongfully diverted to Democrat Joe Biden.

In reality, Barton and her team had discovered a clerical error in the vote tally, correcting it to ensure accurate results as part of normal election procedures.

But the damage had been done. Hearing Barton’s name falsely associated with election fraud sparked an onslaught of scrutiny and threats. One caller — citing Trump’s false claims about the election — even left death threats on her voicemail just a few days after the race.

“I did not expect to go to my office and pick up my own phone, my own voicemail, and have someone call me by name and say: ‘When you least expect it, we will kill you,'” Barton said.

Barton lost her race for city clerk that year and has since focused on training other election officials. But she has a message for powerful political figures.

“When you’re an individual with a platform and who has followers … you have to take responsibility for the words that you’re saying,” Barton said.

Members of the public, she underscored, “may take those words as directives to take action”.

‘Loss of institutional knowledge’

Barton was hardly alone in contending with intimidation after the vote. Thousands of threats have been reported against state, county and city election officials, as well as poll workers, since the 2020 vote.

Examples abound. Al Schmidt, a former election commissioner in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, testified before Congress in 2022 that he and his family were threatened after Trump falsely claimed there was a “mountain of corruption” in the city’s elections.

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also received months of threats after he resisted Trump’s appeal to “find” more votes in the state.

Also in Georgia, mother-and-daughter election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss went into hiding after Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani helped push a conspiracy theory that the two women stashed ballots in suitcases. They later won $148m in a defamation suit against Giuliani.

Earlier this year, the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting policy institute, found that 38 percent of the local election officials it surveyed “experienced threats, harassment, or abuse for doing their jobs”.

In April last year, the centre also found a high likelihood of turnover among election workers. It estimated that 11 percent of election officials were likely to resign from their posts before the November 2024 election.

“The loss of institutional knowledge that accompanies such high turnover can mean that election officials are less aware of resources available to assist them in securing and running their elections,” the centre warned.

Last month, a dedicated Department of Justice task force revealed that, since its launch in 2021, it had received 2,000 referrals for election worker threats and opened 100 investigations. The agency has so far charged 20 people, winning 15 convictions.

Meanwhile, voting experts have said many of this year’s battleground states have failed to pass straightforward reforms that could help stem misinformation.

That includes Pennsylvania, where state legislators rejected a bill that would have allowed mail-in ballots to be processed before election day, thereby facilitating a speedy count.

Theresa Lee, senior staff lawyer at the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said the move is “setting the stage for major delays on election night and putting millions of ballots at risk”.

State election officials, she added, “should be strengthening voter confidence — not weakening it”.

‘Night and day’

With tensions expected to run high on election day, officials and poll workers across the country say they are taking steps to prepare like never before.

In Cobb County, Georgia, election workers have received panic buttons to push, with a direct line to the local sheriff’s office. Meanwhile, in Durham County, North Carolina, election centres are now equipped with bulletproof glass.

And in Los Angeles, California, dogs have been employed to sniff mail-in ballots to detect any dangerous substances.

There has also been a surge in training, led by groups like the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, where Barton is now a senior election expert.

Also affiliated with the group is Chris Harvey, the former police officer and state elections director for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.

Harvey has been leading sessions with local law enforcement and election officials in Georgia, to help plan for contingencies. One training took place recently in Cobb County.

“One of the scenarios they worked through was a bomb threat at a polling place,” he told Al Jazeera.

Harvey noticed that election workers and law enforcement had different ideas about what their roles would be in such a crisis.

“The election people believed or assumed that, if a bomb threat was called in to a polling place, the police would show up, shut everything down, evacuate everyone, search the place for however long it took,” he said.

“The police said, ‘Actually, we don’t do that. We will respond and we will search the area to see if we see anything suspicious or problematic. But it’s up to the election officials to decide if you want to shut it down.'”

Any coordination between police and election officials is delicate, Harvey explained, as the presence of law enforcement can be seen as a deterrent for voting.

But the fact that both sides are collaborating underscores a “stark contrast”. Before 2020, violence was not considered as big a threat. Now, it’s expected.

“It’s night and day,” Harvey said. “It’s a completely different atmosphere.”

Joseph Kirk — the election supervisor in Bartow County, where Montgomery worked — also acknowledged he has had to consider events this year that once seemed like distance fears.

“I never expected to see my fears realised in the way we’ve seen across the country since 2020,” he told Al Jazeera.

“But I’m not gonna let a lack of understanding from people and animosity from people drive me away from something that I love.”