‘We are in harm’s way’: Election officials fear for their personal safety amid torrent of false claims about voting

 

 

 

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/we-are-in-harm-s-way-election-officials-fear-for-their-personal-safety-amid-torrent-of-false-claims-about-voting/ar-AANd6KB?ocid=BingNews

‘We are in harm’s way’: Election officials fear for their personal safety amid torrent of false claims about voting

Tom Hamburger, Rosalind Helderman, Amy Gardner  5 hrs ago

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In preparation for a vote on local tax assessments last week in Houghton County, Mich., county clerk Jennifer Kelly took extraordinary precautions, asking election staff in this remote northern Michigan community to record the serial numbers of voting machines, document the unbroken seals on tabulators and note in writing that no one had tampered with the equipment.

© Sarah Rice for The Washington Post The threats and abuse are “too much,” said City Clerk Susan Nash, pictured in a secure storage room for election equipment at city hall in Livonia, Mich. The room is kept locked and under video surveillance.

In the southeastern part of the state, Michael Siegrist, clerk of Canton Township, followed similar steps, even organizing public seminars to explain how ballots are counted.

Despite their efforts, they said they could not fend off an ongoing torrent of false claims and suspicions about voting procedures that have ballooned since President Donald Trump began his relentless attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election last year.

“People still complained about our Dominion voting machines, about the need for more audits, and most of all they complained about the use of Sharpies,” Siegrist said, referring to the widely used pen, which has become the focus of a conspiracy theory gripping Trump supporters in Arizona and other states.

“It used to be fun to be an election clerk, but it isn’t any more,” he added.

Nine months after the 2020 election, local officials across the country are coping with an ongoing barrage of criticism and personal attacks that many fear could lead to an exodus of veteran election administrators before the next presidential race.

“The complaints, the threats, the abuse, the magnitude of the pressure — it’s too much,’’ said Susan Nash, a city clerk in Livonia, Mich., who has contended with ongoing questions about the integrity of the process in her community.

As Trump continues to promote the false notion that the 2020 White House race was tainted by fraud, there is mounting evidence that his attacks are curdling the faith that many Americans once had in their elections — and taking a deep toll on the public servants who work to protect the vote.

A Monmouth poll taken in June found that a third of Americans believed that President Biden won the White House due to fraud, including 63 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Officials from counties large and small say they are inundated with false claims, such as unsubstantiated allegations that Chinese hackers siphoned votes or that ballots marked by Sharpie pens were disqualified.

The anger is palpable and personal, leading many to fear for their safety.

On Friday, an orange prison jump suit was delivered to offices of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, addressed to the five-member board, which has strongly denounced a recount of 2020 ballots commissioned by the GOP-led state Senate as a sham.

Threats against the Republican-majority board have picked up in recent weeks, particularly after it refused to comply with the Senate’s most recent demand for access to local computer routers and internal logs, said Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates. The board’s stance led some members of the state Senate to call for the supervisors to be jailed and even held in solitary confinement.

Last week, Gates said, the board received a voice mail in which a caller threatened to kill each member and their families.

“This stuff isn’t organic,” Gates said, saying the attacks amount to “a whole dehumanizing of people.”

“It’s that concept that we’re somehow not worthy of respect or safety,” he said. “That we’re traitors.”