‘We’re Going to Hang You’: Threats to Election Workers on the Rise

And the threats—which endanger our democracy—are overwhelmingly coming from one side.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

REGARDLESS OF WHETHER DONALD J. TRUMP is ever held accountable for January 6th—a prospect, always uncertain, made even more tenuous by the Supreme Court’s ruling creating immunity for presidential crimes—that dark day’s legacy endures within the worsening culture of political violence in America. With less than a month to go before the 2024 election, fear among election workers is palpable. Statistics show that threats to local election officials are surging, up 73 percent since the same time in 2022. Election officials are preparing with things like panic buttons, bulletproof glass, and sheriff’s deputies at every polling place, while election-worker turnover has reached historic highs.

In September, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told CBS News: “We’re daily receiving threats, whether it’s through voicemails, emails, social media or in person,” including to her personally, “and it’s escalating. . . . They’re all rooted in lies and misinformation, which is always disappointing and sad, but at the same time, it’s real.” CBS also interviewed Kim Wyman, a top election official at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA), who said that she’s received threats like “we’re going to hang you” and “I hope somebody puts a bullet in your head.” Another CISA elections official, Cait Conley, told VOA that the set of security concerns surrounding this year’s election represent the “most complex threat landscape yet.”

Officials warn that other public servants are getting a growing number of threats, too, including law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and elected officials and candidates. Bill Gates—not the one you’re thinking of, but someone with the same name, a Republican member of the board of supervisors for Arizona’s Maricopa County—has spoken publicly about his need for professional therapy to deal with the threats. He told CBS: “This has unfortunately become a way of life, and we’ve invested as a board in metal detectors, in fencing, in cameras. . . . I wish we didn’t have to do this, but we do.” Republican Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for Georgia’s office of secretary of state, who rose to fame for his press conferences countering Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in Georgia, similarly said that “the biggest thing I worry about” in 2024 “is the possibility of violence by people who lose.” Sterling explained that poll supervisors in his state “are given a direct line to report trouble,” such as “is it somebody yelling at people in the parking lot or is it somebody with a gun?”

Let’s not forget what happened to Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman as a direct result of Trump’s lies and violent rhetoric. Moss told Congress that the attacks destroyed her life, and that she received messages “wishing death upon me. Telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother. And saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’” (For his role in joining Trump in falsely accusing Moss and Freeman of taking fraudulent ballots from a suitcase in Georgia, Rudy Giuliani was hit with a $148 million jury verdict.)

In June 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland launched an Election Threats Task Force charged with engaging with state and local law enforcement to assess and address threats against election workers. Led by the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, the task force identifies “swatting” of election workers as a particularly pernicious problem. A method of choice for intimidating election workers who don’t believe the Big Lie, swatting involves placing hoax calls to 911 with a fake crime report meant to solicit a response from armed SWAT teams. Secretaries of State Benson (D-Mich.) and Shenna Bellows (D-Maine) have both been targets of swatting attacks, and Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D-Col.) has been the subject of many threats.¹

Swatting’s pervasiveness is due in part to advancements in artificial intelligence, which enables perpetrators to mimic the voices of their targets while using proxy servers and encrypted apps to make it harder for law enforcement to identify them. Numerous swat-for-hire accounts are now available on social media, enabling disgruntled voters to outsource their rage to someone willing to make a buck on criminal intimidation tactics. The FBI identified approximately 600 swatting incidents just last year. These hoaxes are extremely serious—one led a Kansas police officer to mistakenly shoot an unarmed man in 2017. Another victim died of a heart attack when a Tennessee police officer told him to come outside with his hands up.

So far, the DOJ task force has received over 2,000 reports from local election officials of disturbing threats they received via emails, phone messages, social media posts, and even disruptive in-person protesters. Most go unaddressed. In May, a man stormed into the Bernalillo County, New Mexico, elections office, took a video of workers testing voting machines, and posted it for over half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel, claiming that the people in the video were hiding information. Nathan Jaramillo, the county’s election administrator, said the attacks were intense: “The language was, ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you. You guys are stealing the election.’ It was overwhelming.” He called the FBI, who responded that the threats were not serious enough to lose First Amendment protections. (In a famous case called Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court held in 1969 that inflammatory and even hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action.”)

Meanwhile, the country has yet to figure out a way to hold Trump accountable for his role in inciting violence on January 6th, thanks in part to the far-right majority on the Supreme Court. His vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, refused to recognize that Trump even lost the 2020 election when asked five times by the New York Times’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro in an interview last week.

It shouldn’t be this way, but it is, and voters need to understand it: No one should be threatened because for working to ensure the smooth operation of the central process of our democracy. But the reality is that election officials are being threatened—and it’s because of Donald Trump and his supporters. A presidential election should be about policy and personality, ideas and leadership; this election, more fundamental things are on the line, including the question of whether our democracy will descend into chaotic political violence because of one man.

1. Correction (October 16, 2024, 1:55 p.m. EDT): As originally written, this sentence included Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold among election officials who have been swatted; it has been corrected to reflect the fact that, while Griswold has been subjected to many threats, she has not been swatted.