WASHINGTON — With less than two weeks until Election Day, law enforcement officials are confronting a rising wave of threats to election workers and political activists in a presidential contest hurtling toward a bitterly contentious coda and a potentially unsettled aftermath.
On Monday, the Justice Department unsealed a complaint against a man in Philadelphia who had vowed to skin alive and kill a party official recruiting volunteer poll watchers. On Tuesday, the police in Tempe, Arizona, arrested a man in connection with shootings at a Democratic campaign office, which resulted in no injuries, and other acts of political vandalism.
On Wednesday, prosecutors charged a 61-year-old man from Tampa, Florida, with threatening an election official — on top of pending charges over menacing messages sent in the past five years. And Thursday, police officers in Phoenix arrested a person in connection with a mailbox fire, damaging some 20 ballots in a Democratic stronghold.
Law enforcement’s task this year goes far beyond the relatively straightforward job of providing physical security — to the essential mission of safeguarding the election from individuals and groups who want to instill fear and uncertainty, even if they never resort to violence.
Political battlegrounds are taking on the sobering characteristics of actual ones. Drones, barriers and snipers are expected to be deployed at some offices and polling sites. Bulletproof glass and armed security patrols are becoming increasingly commonplace everywhere.
“The fact that election workers need to be worried about their security is incomprehensible and unacceptable,” Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, said in a statement Wednesday after the Justice Department released an update on threats to election workers and political activists.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security issued an internal memo warning that some domestic extremists were “engaging in illegal preparatory or violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war,” according to a report obtained through an open records request by Property of the People, a nonpartisan group.
Federal officials have not released data on the volume of violent threats and incidents of intimidation reported by local governments, but experts say it has increased substantially since the summer. Still, the threat level has been manageable thus far. Federal law enforcement officials say that for the moment, there are no indications of an organized effort to disrupt the electoral process as in 2021, when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol.
Nonetheless, anxiety is spreading at all levels of government. There have already been two assassination attempts against the former president this year, and officials remain concerned about lone actors as well as potential militia activity, although none has yet been detected.
“Our polling places have become battlegrounds,” Isaac Cramer, executive director of South Carolina’s Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections, said in congressional testimony this year. He described one particularly unnerving practice being employed against his poll workers: roving groups who show up at voting locations to threaten volunteers and staff with citizen arrests.
Sara Tindall Ghazal, a member of the Georgia state election board, said officials had faced an array of tactics, including death threats and hoax calls intended to elicit an armed police response.
The attacks on workers can be painfully personal, she added. Neighbors shout in their faces when they go to church on Sundays. Children answering the door when their parents are not home have been subjected to terrifying harangues.
“It’s really hard to conceive how we walk back from this,” Ghazal said.
In 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland created an elections threat task force based in the department’s public integrity unit to address the growing threats to election security. The effort includes the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Department of Homeland Security and cybersecurity agencies.
The federal government’s legal and logistical reach is limited. Overseeing elections and securing poll sites — within the confines of the Constitution and federal law — has been the responsibility of local authorities from the earliest days of the republic. Local law enforcement, particularly state police and county sheriffs, play a front-line role in investigating many threats, with federal officials taking a lead part in cases that clearly involve national elections.
The task force has brought charges in only a handful of criminal cases, most involving people who made overtly violent and outrageous threats, in part because the majority of hostile communications directed at workers is found to be protected under the First Amendment.
Those prosecutions represent a small fraction of the threats that have been investigated, but federal officials believe that they serve as a deterrent. Several defendants, in fact, expressed astonishment and remorse that their outbursts had grave personal consequences.
“The thing that really struck me was when I was first arrested. I’m sitting in a jail cell, and I was already underwater, you know, my head spinning,” Francis Goltz, 52, said in court this month after pleading guilty in August 2023 to threatening election officials in Arizona.
“I should have been putting my kids to bed, locking the doors and whatnot,” he added. “I wasn’t there because of the stupidity that I displayed.”
Over the past year, the Justice Department task force has conducted multiagency tabletop exercises and training sessions for a range of scenarios. They span efforts to disrupt voting on Election Day, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence threats, tampering with mail-in ballots and the targeting of officials and volunteers if the results are contested, as they were four years ago.
The FBI and task force officials will establish a national command center in Washington and other locations around the country Nov. 1, the Friday before Election Day, to monitor threats and coordinate any federal response.
The plan is to close the center a week later, but officials believe it will have to remain open much longer, given the likelihood of postelection legal challenges — and threats.
Local elections officials and federal law enforcement agencies are just as worried about what will happen if the neck-and-neck battle between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump drags into an extended period of legal and political wrangling.
Some officials and election security experts are anxious that the growing expectation among Trump supporters that his victory is inevitable could spur acts of violence, harassment and intimidation by individual perpetrators or small pop-up cadres.
“The election denialists are better coordinated and better funded than they have ever been, and there could be so much false information,” added Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center, a New York-based nonpartisan policy and legal institute that surveyed election workers this year.
The survey found that almost 40% had been the target of threats or harassment. One in four expressed fear their families would be targeted, and a third said they knew someone who had given up their job to avoid the hassle and hazard.
It has been a challenge to recruit Republican election judges, who became the targets of Trump supporters four years ago, Aaron O. Ammons, the clerk of Champaign County, Illinois, said on a call organized by the Election Center, a national organization of election officials.
The biggest concern for federal law enforcement is that there might be an undetected effort to disrupt the electoral process. The people most prone to acting violently, like the two would-be Trump assassins, do not often explicitly advertise their plans.
The Department of Homeland Security memo last month reported that there was “no indication” of a coordinated plan.
But officials also conceded that they lacked “a complete threat picture due to the ability” of some groups “to evade law enforcement using advanced encryption.”
There are, however, differences between the current environment and the heated atmosphere of the 2020 campaign, which took place amid protests against pandemic restrictions, unrest following the murder of George Floyd, and the conservative backlash against that movement.
Law enforcement officials believe a bloody mass attack like the one that erupted nearly four years ago at the Capitol is less likely this time around — in part because they have strengthened security protocols and in part because leaders of the two extremist groups that played central roles in the attack, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, were convicted and sent to prison.
Prosecutors hope that many would-be perpetrators will be dissuaded from taking action by the cautionary example of key figures who abetted Trump’s attempts to stay in office. Those include the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, who is facing criminal charges and has been disbarred and stripped of his assets following a $150 million judgment for defaming two Georgia election workers.
But local governments in battleground states, who face the brunt of attacks and intimidation, are on high alert. They have taken steps to protect their workers from a repeat of the 2020 and 2022 elections, when there was also a heightened level of threats.
Most of that funding has come from local and state coffers, but in 2023, the Homeland Security Department mandated that states steer tens of millions in federal grants to election security and to prepare for extremist attacks.
In Cobb County, a vote-rich chunk of suburbia north of Atlanta, managers at all 148 polling places have been given police-style radios with panic buttons that allow for instant contact with law enforcement personnel.
Ross Cavitt, a county spokesperson, said that officials’ safety concerns stemmed in part from a heated but nonviolent confrontation that a poll worker had in March with a man who was carrying a gun.
The elections office in Fulton County, the state’s most populous county, was targeted last year by anonymously mailed letters, several of which appeared to have been laced with fentanyl.
As a result, most elections offices in Georgia’s 159 counties are now stocked with naloxone, the opioid overdose medication, if workers are exposed to the potentially deadly drug.
“I do remember back in the 1990s, the police department would direct traffic on Election Day,” said W. Wade Yates, the county’s police chief. “That’s really all we did.”
In Maricopa County, Arizona, a critical battleground, officials are taking extraordinary efforts to bolster security.
The voting tabulation center there has become a hardened target for the 2024 election, with local law enforcement officials assigning snipers to the roof, deploying drones to monitor potential attacks, and installing new floodlights and cameras.
The goal is not only to protect workers but also to foster the safety and stability necessary to preserve American democracy.
“If someone does not like the outcome of the election, it would be just as simple as preventing one state from casting their electoral votes,” Police Chief Shon F. Barnes of the Madison Police Department in Wisconsin said Monday at a law enforcement conference in Boston. “We cannot allow that to happen. We just can’t.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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