Election officials ‘look over our shoulders more’ as US political violence surges

The second apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life on Sunday is the latest episode this year to underscore the way that the threat of violence has become ubiquitous for public officials in American life.

It is a threat that touches officials at every level, from presidential candidates like Trump, who have around-the-clock protection from the Secret Service, to lower level judges and election officials, who do not have that level of security.

Violence has loomed over the 2024 election for months. Maine’s secretary of state Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, had her home swatted after she disqualified Trump from the presidential ballot late last year. Justices on the Colorado supreme court faced death threats after doing the same (their decision was eventually overturned by the US supreme court) in December.

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted Donald Trump in the hush-money case, received more than 60 threats targeted at him, his family, and his office, the New York Police Department said in an affidavit earlier this year. Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw that case, also faced significant threats.

For local election officials, who have tiny budget and were virtually anonymous until the 2020 election, the threat of violence has been particularly acute. In Georgia, one key battleground county in suburban Atlanta recently voted to approve $50,000 on panic buttons for election workers and an extra $14,000 to hire a security guard. Several other counties have reportedly expressed interest in the panic button.

A June national survey by the Chicago project on security and threats (Cpost) found that 10% of respondents felt violence was justified to prevent Trump from becoming president. The same survey found 6.8% of American adults felt violence was justified to restore Trump to the presidency. Until January, the survey had showed there was more support for violence in favor of Trump.

“All political leaders and presidential candidates should immediately condemn political violence, regardless of whether it comes from the Left or Right, rather than wait for a spiral of escalation to occur,” Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, who leads Cpost said in an email Sunday.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have condemned both attacks on Trump’s life. But Trump, who has long relied on the threat of violence since he encouraged supporters to beat up protesters during his 2016 campaign, has blamed Harris.

“Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” he said in a post on truth social. Elon Musk, a Trump ally, posted that “no one is even trying to assassinate” Biden or Harris before deleting the tweet and saying he was joking.

While that response comes after a threat on his own life, it also comes after several years of amplifying false claims of a stolen election that have put others at risk.

A survey of more than 900 election officials by the Brennan Center for Justice earlier this year found that 40% of them have improved the physical security of election offices or polling places. Nearly 40% of them also reported receiving harassment, abuse, or threats, and 70% of those surveyed said they believed the threats had increased since 2020.

Claire Woodall-Vogg, who served as the executive director of the Milwaukee election commission from 2020 until earlier this year, said the city had spent more than $100,000 to improve physical security in her office.

“You used to be able to walk up to a desk, reach across, shake somebody’s hand, and now we have shatterproof glass and panic buttons and things like that,” said Woodall-Vogg, who is now a senior adviser at Issue One, a government watchdog group. The group recently launched a pledge to support election officials amid the threats they face.

Before 2020, there would be voters who would be upset about elections, but often it would be an objection to a specific rule or law, she added.

“We would have citizens who were frustrated or angry oftentimes with the way in which laws were written, but once you explain to them, “I have to ask for your photo ID, it’s under state statute,” she said. “You could usually defuse that situation.”

Now, she said, “it’s become a situation where it’s not that you disagree with the law, you are accusing us of not following the law but with no proof, and when we try to provide proof, you then just dismiss it”.

The justice department also started a special unit focused on election crimes, but it has faced some criticism for being slow and not aggressive enough in its response.

Woodall-Vogg, who did not have any type of security detail when she went out in public, said going out was a balance between being transparent about elections and speaking to a room of hostile people who refuse to believe the election was legitimate.

Barb Byrum, the county clerk in Ingham county, Michigan, who oversees elections there, said the Department of Homeland Security had recently visited her office to perform a site security assessment. She declined to go into detail about what her office was doing to upgrade security.

“I now have window shades in my office so that individuals across the street cannot see me sitting at my desk,” she said. “All of us look over our shoulders a little more.”