Voice of America: Justice Department Investigating More Than 100 Cases of Threats Against Election Workers

WASHINGTON — 

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating more than 100 cases of threats made against local election officials over the past year, most of them in states that former President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden during the 2020 election.

The disclosure was made Monday by the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force during a briefing for a bipartisan group of about 750 election officials and workers.

The task force has reviewed more than 1,000 “contacts” reported as “hostile or harassing” by election workers, determining that 11% of the contacts — made by phone, email, social media, or in person — met the Justice Department’s threshold to open a federal criminal investigation.

That amounts to roughly 110 threats under investigation. But because many of the cases under investigation involved more than one threat, the actual number of ongoing probes is far less than 110, a department spokesman explained.

The task force was set up in June 2021 in response to growing threats against election workers in the aftermath of the contentious 2020 presidential election. Its members review threats reported to the FBI, which has appointed an election crime coordinator at each of its 56 field offices.

The 1,000-plus harassing and hostile contacts made to election officials covered the period from June 2021 to June 2022. The trend continued in July, the task force told the election officials, according to Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, who attended the briefing. …

In total, 89% of the contacts made to election officials were deemed protected speech and could not be investigated.

“A lot of the questions were aimed at ‘Wait. Really? You can only investigate 11% of cases?’ And them saying, ‘Yes, I’m sorry but we can only investigate things not protected by First Amendment,’” Albert said.