When I was a young girl, my mother was a volunteer poll watcher for the non-partisan League of Women Voters of New York. I remember her going to voting sites as early as 5am on election days, and working until the polls closed at night. She helped confused voters cast their ballots and—like almost all election workers and poll watchers then and now—never dreamt of influencing who they supported. Facilitating the democratic process was a privilege. It also seemed completely uncontroversial.
Since the 2020 presidential election, though, election volunteers have become the targets of suspicion. Volunteers preparing for November’s vote are being subjected to vicious online abuse and threats of real violence. Some poll watchers have received death threats or had their family members threatened. The task of administering elections has become a dangerous job.
Colorado’s Democrat secretary of state, Jena Griswold, is a case in point. In the two years after the 2020 election, she received hundreds of threats, mostly on social media. One Facebook message warned her to watch her back. “I KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP, I SEE YOU SLEEPING. BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID” the message read. According to the Washington Post, the torrent of online harassment that she experienced “is indicative of a tide of threats that have targeted election workers at all levels, from secretaries of state to poll workers.”
The reason is clear. Although cases of voter fraud in the US are extremely rare—a 2007 study of elections by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found it is more likely that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls”—and there is scant evidence that any took place in the presidential contest won by Joe Biden, there is still deep anger among conservatives who falsely believe that poll workers and election officials conspired to allow Democrats to steal the 2020 election.
“Elections experts say the threats are a direct result of the false narratives about the 2020 elections that were spread in part on social media and have catapulted once obscure administrators and county officials to the center of viral hoaxes and conspiracy theories,” the Washington Post said.
In 2024, conservatives are once again gearing up to challenge the legitimacy of the election if Kamala Harris is declared the winner and generally make it harder for people to vote.
A Republican-backed “dark money” group, the Election Integrity Network, has raised millions of dollars towards its work scrutinising the electoral roll—which risks restricting voting access for eligible voters. It is led by Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who worked with Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Mitchell joined Trump’s notorious phone call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in January 2021, in which Trump repeatedly pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” and overturn the state’s 2020 election results, which made Biden the narrow winner. At a GOP donor retreat in Nashville last year, according to the Washington Post, Mitchell called for limits on voting on college campuses, an end to same-day voter registration and the outlawing of automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters.
Republicans are also raising money to challenge the results on grounds of voter fraud if Democrats win the White House. Party officials now have millions in the bank to fund legal challenges if the Democrats win key battleground states by close margins. According to Reuters, “state and federal judges—some appointed by Trump—have dismissed more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump or his allies alleging election fraud and other irregularities.” Trump and his lawyers have been strikingly unsuccessful in the courts but, instead of being discouraged, they have instead redoubled their efforts to disqualify likely Democratic voters.
Democrats, too, are preparing for expensive legal campaigns after the 2024 election, with some fearing that Maga Republicans will once again try to overturn the election if Kamala Harris wins, perhaps attempting to replicate the January 6th assault on the Capitol.
Some Trump allies who spearheaded aggressive assaults on election workers following the 2020 vote have been held accountable. The most notorious case involved Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who falsely accused two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, of misconduct during ballot counting in Georgia. Because of Giuliani’s smear, the mother and daughter faced a torrent of violent, racist threats and had to leave their jobs. Freeman and Moss successfully sued Giuliani for defamation and were awarded $146m in damages. Last Friday, they filed a new legal action to take possession of Giuliani’s luxury homes in New York and Florida as well as the millions in legal fees that he has billed as Trump’s lawyer.
In June 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to protect election workers from pervasive threats and his deputy, Lisa Monaco, created an Election Threats Task Force, which has since brought at least 17 prosecutions and won 13 convictions. One man who said an election worker in Michigan deserved a knife to the throat pled guilty. Another was convicted for threatening a mass shooting against election workers in Arizona. Just last week, the Justice Department Task Force announced the arrest of a Colorado man for making online “detailed death threats against election officials, judges, and law enforcement officers” in Colorado and Arizona.
However, the risks to election workers—already serious—may become greater. In the key state of Georgia, Democrats are already suing to prevent last-minute Republican-endorsed changes to the state’s vote certification procedures that give local election officials broader license to find voting irregularities and delay certification of the state’s vote because of allegations of fraud. In August, the New York Times reported that many public servants have resigned or retired over the stress of threats and countering disinformation and conspiracies.
The presidential election is less than 80 days away, but early voting in some states begins as early as mid-September. Bogus charges of voter fraud are expected to immediately follow and grow louder. There is every indication that the partisan feuding over the election results in the 2024 presidential contest could be even more intense than in the aftermath of 2020. And many workers and volunteers charged with administering fair voting are justifiably quaking in fear.
