Preparing for the Worst: Election Workers Expect Threats in US Vote | News about the 2024 US election

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

Barton, a Republican, served in government for more than three decades, eventually taking on the role of city clerk. This position required her, among other things, to conduct elections and maintain voter files.

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, which counted just a few thousand votes in Florida.

Years later, in 2016, Barton also noticed the election denial. At the time, Green Party candidate Jill Stein was pushing for sweeping recounts in three battleground states, including Michigan, after finishing fourth in the presidential race.

When those efforts failed, Stein lamented, “We don’t have an electoral system we can trust.”

In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams was also defiant after her loss to Brian Kemp in 2018, accusing Republicans of “rigging” the system in her favor, even as she acknowledged they were acting within the law at the time.

But those emerging signs of increasing skepticism morphed into something different after the 2020 vote, Barton said.

“Up to this point, the attack has been more on the process and the doubts about the process and the way we conduct elections in our country,” she told Al Jazeera. “We really didn’t have the attention that we had individually.”

For Barton, this new spotlight on poll workers came with threats.

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

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

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

But the damage was done. When Barton’s name was falsely linked to voter fraud, it sparked a flood of inquiries and threats. One caller even left death threats on her voicemail just days after the race, citing Trump’s false claims about the election.

“I wasn’t expecting to walk into my office, pick up my own phone, my own voicemail, and have someone call me by name and say, ‘When you least expect it, we’re going to kill you,'” Barton said.

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

“If you are a person with a platform and followers, you have to take responsibility for the words you say,” Barton said.

She stressed that members of the public “may interpret these words as instructions to action.”