Residents in Anchorage, Alaska wait to vote.Mark Thiessen/AP

This article was originally published by News21, a Carnegie-Knight and Walter Cronkite School national student investigative project.

Exactly seven days had passed since the 2020 presidential election when Tina Barton sat down at her desk and saw the blinking light on her office phone.

It had already been a week from hell for the city clerk of Rochester Hills. Her office was responsible for administering an election that had grown increasingly contested, especially in her home state of Michigan. At one point, she’d worked for 36 hours straight.

She picked up the phone and hit the flashing button. A voice rang out that she would never forget.

“We will fucking take you out,” a man said on her voicemail. “Fuck your family, fuck your life, and you deserve the fucking throat to the knife. … Watch your fucking back.”

She listened again. She’d heard correctly. The man parroted then-President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen, savaging Barton, a Republican, for her role in the “fraudulent” outcome.

Barton saved the message, called in a co-worker and filed a police report.

She immediately feared for herself, her husband and her children. Did the man know where she lived? Barton called friends in the military and asked them to identify vulnerabilities at her home. She asked neighbors to be on the lookout for anything suspicious, and she began screening phone calls.

She had cameras and floodlights installed at her home and took different routes to and from work, scared of being followed. She described herself as living in a state of “hypervigilance.”

“Anytime someone feels they have either been threatened, harassed or abused in a way that impacts their mental and physical well-being, that, to me, is violence,” says Barton, who has since left her role as an elections official to train those who may face similar situations. “Whether they ever lay a hand on them or not, it is impacting them in a way that can be life-changing.”

Over those few weeks after the 2020 presidential election, the lives of election workers fundamentally changed. Theirs once was a quiet, mostly anonymous job tending to the machinery behind American democracy. Suddenly, they became the targets of angry mobs fueled by misinformation.

An administrator in Georgia got a death threat with a picture of his face in crosshairs and a photo of his front yard. Another, in Arizona, ate Thanksgiving dinner with his family while armed guards protected his house. Official after official received menacing messages over social media, in emails and voicemails, and even in person.

Those threats weren’t isolated to the 2020 election. As Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake fell in step with Trump and refused to accept the results of the 2022 election, that state became a hotbed for threats. More than one-third of the 20 cases prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Election Threats Task Force stem from threats against Arizona officials.

The threats—poised to intensify in a political climate that’s growing increasingly violent—represent a generational challenge for the administration of American elections.

According to a study published in May by the Brennan Center for Justice, 54% of election workers fear for their or their colleagues’ safety. Another 34% say they know of someone in the field who quit over these concerns.

Those who stay worry about what might happen should they leave. They know their experience will be needed in November and in elections to come, but they dread what’s ahead.

“Depending on how it turns out, our state of democracy could fall over the edge, or it could veer back over onto the plateau,” says Rosanne Rickabaugh, deputy director of elections in Defiance County, Ohio. “I think it’s on a precipice right now.”

To shore up democracy’s defenses, many election offices are increasing security this presidential cycle. In Shasta County, California, officials erected ceiling-high security fences to protect workers from angry election deniers. At the Defiance County Board of Elections, panic buttons were installed.

In California, a coalition of 11 counties is pooling funds to provide voter outreach and education in an effort to be more transparent with those who question the system.

Law enforcement officials nationwide are beginning to recognize that elections, once an afterthought, must become a major focus. In Maricopa County, Arizona, the new sheriff has made the security of elections and workers a top priority. Election and police officials from Georgia to Ohio and beyond are conducting joint training to prepare for violence.

Other states have responded with legislative action. In the past two years, some 60 bills have been introduced in 40 states to either increase protections for poll workers and election officials or bolster the penalties for those who threaten them. About half of those bills have become law.

But some states, such as Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, have made the electoral process even more difficult. Citing concerns about fraudulent voting and election interference, Republican leaders instituted laws making it harder for citizens to vote or for election workers to count ballots.

All of these dizzying changes are keeping election administrators on their toes........

© Mother Jones