Salon: Election officials preparing for worst-case scenarios: Violence around the midterms

Election officials across the country are concerned with potential violence and other disruptions compromising this November’s midterm elections. Some are even quitting their jobs as Donald Trump’s allies continue to push out false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. …

Efforts by Trump allies to overturn the last presidential election have persisted, even close to two years after the fact, and false claims about the supposedly stolen election have created safety concerns for administrators across the country. One in six elec­tion offi­cials have exper­i­enced threats and 77% say that they feel those threats have increased in recent years, according to a Brennan Center poll released earlier this year.

Death threats, racist and gender-based attacks are reportedly forcing election workers to hire personal security, leave their homes and in some cases even resign from their positions.  …

Following the 2020 election, Anissa Herrera, the elections administrator for Gillespie County, Texas, received a number of death threats from far-right sources against her staff, which led to numerous resignations.

Such experiences have become so commonplace that election clerks consider it a part of their job, said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas.

“These election administrators keep saying that they report things to law enforcement or local DAs and nothing happens, like nobody’s being prosecuted,” Gutierrez said.

Common Cause, which does election protection work, is also looking at potential ways to hold people who attack election workers accountable. What has complicated that task, Gutierrez and others say, is that numerous people in leadership positions keep casting doubt on the way elections are administered.

Last year, Texas Secretary of State John Scott claimed that a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 general election was necessary to restore Texas voters’ trust in the state’s election systems. (Trump easily carried the state.) Scott also briefly represented Trump in a legal challenge to the 2020 results in Pennsylvania.

For an elected state official to embrace that narrative, Gutierrez said, “really perpetuates this feeling that the people running our elections are doing something wrong, or trying to rig the elections. Just naturally, that’s going to create an environment where you’re asking for some kind of violence to happen.”