US election officials expect threats

Kris Burlingame had a surprise on test day.

As a longtime poll worker and former clerk in the Wisconsin village of Alma Center, she is well-versed in election law, including the routine requirement to invite the public to test voting machines.

Normally nothing happens. None of the population actually accepted such an invitation, she said – until a man showed up at the last test on August 1st.

“He had just moved into the area and was belligerent and angry,” Ms. Burlingame said.

The middle-aged man started taking photos and asking questions – how did the machines work? Were the machines connected to the internet? (This wasn’t the case, but he insisted on being shown the internet connections).

“These are the machines that changed everyone’s votes,” the man said, repeating a widespread and debunked conspiracy theory about a particular brand of voting machines.

“I said, ‘There’s no way they can do that,'” Ms. Burlingame recalls. “He wasn’t happy with me.”

Eventually the man left, but the incident gave her pause.

“It made me nervous. I wasn’t afraid…but it made me stop and think: What will the choice be? Will we have more of this?”

Incidents like the one in Alma Center, a village of about 500 residents in mostly rural Jackson County in western Wisconsin, have become increasingly common across the country in recent years, experts say.

As a result, officials are preparing for another important election on November 5 by beefing up security to ensure the safety of workers at polling stations. They also work to protect voters from possible intimidation or manipulation of the electoral process.

Threats against poll workers have increased since the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump and his allies falsely claimed he had won.

Conspiracy theories about the electoral process led to threats against election workers and culminated in the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Distrust of elections is now so widespread that it has spread far beyond urban areas with large vote-counting operations and has crept into places like Jackson County. Wisconsin is a battleground state that President Joe Biden won by fewer than 21,000 votes four years ago.

Poll workers are on the front lines.

A survey earlier this year by the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan but left-leaning think tank, found that 38% of local election officials had experienced threats, harassment or mistreatment.

More than half were concerned about the safety of their colleagues or employees, a level that has remained more or less constant since the 2022 midterm elections.

“People are scared,” said Melissa Kono, the elected city clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin.

Ms. Kono travels throughout Wisconsin providing state-mandated election training to volunteer poll workers.

She says the types of scenarios she’s asked about have changed dramatically over the past five years, to the point where she’s increasingly incorporating threat-management material into her sessions.

“I’m worried about the clerks and the poll workers,” she said.

Ms Kono told the BBC that she and other election officials are considering scenarios that were unthinkable just a few years ago, such as planning for active shooters at polling stations.

Their handouts to on-site workers now include a list of emergency numbers that are useful in extreme weather conditions and natural disasters, as well as threats of violence.

“When people feel the stakes are very high, they are willing to take extreme measures to win,” she said during a break in one of the sessions at the courthouse in Black River Falls, population 3,500 the largest settlement in Jackson County.

“It’s one thing to prepare workers for the things that are in the Election Day handbook, like how to process mail-in ballots. What are the photo ID requirements?

“But it’s all these things that I just can’t even predict,” she said. “I worry that I haven’t prepared her for her safety.”

Ms. Kono and other election officials expressed concern about the risk of further political violence surrounding this year’s election.

Donald Trump himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on his life in Pennsylvania in July and escaped a second assassination attempt on his golf course in Florida in September.

Among other things, election officials were sent white powder in the mail and became victims of “swatting”—anonymous 911 calls about fictitious crimes designed to lure armed police into people’s homes.

At the same time, Trump and his allies have continued to sow doubts about the integrity of the U.S. electoral system, which is characterized by a patchwork of rules, regulations and methods that make November’s vote less of a nationwide vote and more of an interlocking network of thousands of local elections .

In 2016, he said – without any real evidence – that millions of votes had been cast fraudulently, but conspiracy theories peaked in 2020 when the Covid pandemic led many states to change laws to allow early voting to facilitate postal voting or absentee voting.

Although the 2022 midterm elections were largely peaceful, experts say there continues to be misinformation about the election that has the potential to spark unrest or even violence.

“When I was a poll worker, I didn’t receive death threats,” says Elizabeth Howard, director at the Brennan Center and former deputy elections commissioner in Virginia.

Ms Howard said nearly two-fifths of poll workers facing threats was a “very worrying number”.

“It is no surprise that these threats are causing election officials to leave their jobs,” she said.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice created a task force to investigate threats against election workers and has since investigated more than 2,000 threats. But only in a few cases – 20 recently – have criminal charges been filed.

Ms. Howard noted that the recent threats are not a partisan issue and that the vast majority of election officials have taken measures to increase security since 2020.

The most common measure is cooperation with law enforcement, she said, but some polling places have installed panic buttons, bulletproof glass or electronic security measures.

“Election officials on both sides of the aisle have been threatened,” she said.

This includes Republican Bill Gates – no relation to the Microsoft founder – who, as supervisor of Maricopa County, Arizona, was the victim of threats in 2020 and 2022.

“It’s something people talk about all the time,” he said, noting that people were spotted taking photos of poll workers and their license plates outside the county tabulation center in Phoenix, the state’s largest city.

“People are still questioning the 2020 election almost every day,” he told the BBC.

“If you look at my X account, it’s just constant.

“I’ll type something like ‘I had a sandwich today’ and (someone will reply) ‘You stole the election in 2020’.”

“It shouldn’t be like this,” he said. “People who vote in elections should not be subjected to this malice, these insults… it’s just crazy.”

Gates suffered from post-traumatic stress and is not running for re-election as Maricopa supervisor this year for various reasons.

Back in Wisconsin, about 50 Jackson County poll workers crowded into a courtroom lightly decorated with paintings and prints of local rural scenes in early October to attend one of Ms. Kono’s training sessions.

“No one can be disruptive,” she told them, explaining the rules for partisan poll watchers, or “poll watchers,” as they are called in Wisconsin. “Observers have some rules they must follow” – they cannot wear buttons or hats in support of a candidate and must stay in a designated area.

“You don’t have to make them comfortable, do you?” asked a volunteer.

“I don’t think that’s in the election manual,” Ms. Kono replied, smiling as the room erupted in laughter. “Well, I wouldn’t feed her.”

There are dozens of slides on election procedures and rules, as well as threats and security. Ms. Kono explained the difference between a “real threat” — threatening an election official is illegal in Wisconsin — and an angry but legal comment. She distributed the packets she had prepared with local emergency contacts and other useful phone numbers.

“There are a lot of things you should really be aware of on election day,” she told the group.

Not everyone in Black River Falls is so worried about the safety of poll workers.

At the local Republican district office, just a short walk down Main Street, Republican district chairman Bill Laurent was more confident.

“This is the kind of place where you go to vote and the workers have a cookie or a piece of cake for you,” he said. “I haven’t heard of any major problems.”

However, reflecting the views of national party leadership, Mr. Laurent said he was not confident the vote outside Jackson County would be fair – citing in particular his fears of dirty tricks in Democratic strongholds in Wisconsin’s two largest cities, Madison and Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, the possibility of increasing threats to interfere with the election was on the minds of several of the volunteers here, including Ms. Burlingame, who took on the aggressive voting machine skeptic in August.

Before 2020, she said, she would have estimated the chance of disruption on Election Day to be close to zero.

“Now I think it’s about four or five,” she said on a 10-point scale.

“I don’t think anything will happen, but I won’t turn a blind eye,” she said. “There are just some people I just can’t trust, and that scares me.”