‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms:
local election officials fear for safety
In two rural California counties, voters are showing
increasing hostility and aggression toward election workers
Dani
Anguiano in Redding, California
@dani_anguiano
Thu 27 Oct
2022 06.00 EDT
Inside the
office of the Shasta county clerk and registrar of voters, which runs elections
for about 111,000 people in this part of far northern California, Cathy Darling
Allen can see all the security improvements she would make if she had the
budget.
“We have
plexi on the counter downstairs for Covid but that won’t stop a person. It’s
literally just clamped to the counters,” the county clerk and registrar said.
For about $50,000, the office could secure the front, limiting access to
upstairs offices, she estimated. Another county put bulletproof glass in their
lobby years earlier, she knew, something officials there at one point
considered removing, though not any more.
Elections
offices didn’t used to think about security in this way, Allen said. Now they
can’t afford not to.
Following
Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential
election, Allen says the once low-profile job of non-partisan local election
official has transformed in counties like hers. A culture of misinformation has
sown doubt in the US election system and subjected officials from Nevada to
Michigan to harassment and threats. The FBI has received more than 1,000
reports of threats against election workers in the past year alone.
In
California, officials in small, rural and underresourced counties such as
Shasta say they are encountering hostility and aggressive bullying from
residents who believe there is widespread voter fraud – many are inundating
local elections offices with public records requests as part of a relentless
quest to try to prove their claims.
Residents
in Shasta county have tried to intimidate election workers while acting as
observers, crowding around Allen during a tense election night confrontation in
June, and visiting voters’ homes while claiming to be a part of an “official
taskforce”. In north-eastern California’s Nevada county, the registrar-elect
had to take out a restraining order against residents who harassed her and
pushed their way into her office, assaulting a staffer, she said.
“It’s
really an unprecedented time,” said Kim Alexander, the president of the
non-partisan California Voter Foundation, a non-profit organization that works
on improving election processes. “A colleague recently referred to it as a sort
of madness that’s taken hold.”
On a
Tuesday in September, speaker after speaker went before the Shasta county board
of supervisors decrying the “election fraud” they believed – without evidence –
is taking place. Dressed in red, white and blue, the residents described their
effort as a David-and-Goliath-like battle.
“It’s
called a citizen’s audit and we’ve been going out and collecting the evidence
that shows there is fraud in our process,” one speaker said. “This is our Tiananmen
Square. We’re going to stand in front of the tanks and say no more to the
machines.”
The group
of residents casting doubt over Shasta’s elections is small but highly visible,
and speaks regularly at county board meetings. They have filed dozens of public
records requests to Allen’s office, showed up in large numbers for election
observation, and even visited the homes of certain voters while wearing gear
labeled “official voter taskforce” – an act that Allen said may amount to voter
intimidation.
Their
opposition comes amid broader political upheaval in this rural northern county,
stemming from anger among some residents over Trump’s loss and pandemic
restrictions and vaccine mandates imposed by California’s progressive
government.
The anger
coalesced into an anti-establishment movement, backed with unprecedented
outside funding from a Connecticut millionaire and supported by the area’s
militia groups, that led to the recall of a longtime county supervisor in
February. Behavior seen during that election prompted Allen’s office to make
security changes, including tracking everyone who enters the facility.
During the
primaries in June, when the school superintendent, district attorney and sheriff
were on the ballot, a crowd of observers tried to intimidate county staff,
Allen said, and someone installed a trail camera outside the office, seemingly
intending to monitor election workers. The sheriff stationed deputies outside
the office. After four of the candidates backed by the anti-establishment group
lost outright – Allen beat her opponent and was re-elected to her fifth-term –
the candidates requested a hand recount.
The
county’s use of Dominion voting machines, which Trump supporters have maligned
as part of a false conspiracy theory that the company played a role in swinging
the 2020 election for Biden, has drawn particular concern from residents who
believe in widespread election fraud. Some of them have attempted to share
content with Allen, such as 2000 Mules, a debunked documentary that has
promoted false claims about voter fraud.
One
high-profile figure in the election denial movement recently held a $20 event
at a church in the area. The grandstanding from people making money from spreading
debunked narratives around elections is particularly frustrating for Allen.
If there
are problems around elections, she said, she would rely on the actual experts
she knows who have worked in the field for decades and share information for
free: “I guarantee you, they’re not gonna charge people 20 bucks a head at a
church in Redding, California, to tell the story. That’s making you a dollar,
that’s not trying to make anything better.”
Allen’s
office has seen aggressive behavior and bullying, she said, but no threats yet.
Given the threats elections officials across the US are facing, she suspects
it’s only a matter of time.
“This is
not what anybody signed up for,” she said. “I’ve had people tell me I should
have private security. It’s not right. But it’s the world we live in right
now.”
‘Just another form of harassment’
About 150
miles away in the Sierra Nevada foothills in eastern California, Natalie Adona
said her office, too, was experiencing the same challenges: “If it’s happening
in Shasta, chances are it’s also happening here. The loudest would-be
disruptors of elections share information between our counties.”
Political
tensions in Nevada county, which is home to about 100,000 people in historic
towns and settlements that were at the center of California’s Gold Rush, have
been rising since after the 2020 election, said Adona, the assistant county
clerk recorder.
Earlier
this year a group of residents attempted an aggressive and ultimately
unsuccessful campaign to recall the entire board of supervisors, accusing them
of enabling “crimes against humanity” for supporting Covid safety measures.
While
running for her position this spring, Adona said she and her office were
subjected to a months-long public harassment campaign, as well as racist
language in an election mailer that featured a darkened photo of her and
efforts to disqualify her over false claims that she failed to pay filing fees.
After Adona won by nearly 70%, opponents requested a recount.
“I
considered it to be just another form of harassment and I think one of the
other purposes was to try to get at other documents that aren’t normally
[obtainable] in the regular observation process,” she said.
At the same
time, her office has received a flurry of public records requests in recent
months that appear to be copy-and-pasted, Adona said: “What we’re today is
either deliberate attempts to put a kink in elections process or just sort of
an inundation of requests that really reflect how little the requestor knows
about elections.”
Adona has
also received one threat, she said, which was not actionable by law
enforcement.
“It’s
certainly not at the level of Georgia or Wisconsin. I do feel fortunate but at
the same time a lot of it is unnerving,” she said.
The Nevada
county office has increased its budget for security at its headquarters and is
working more closely with law enforcement.
“I have the
best job in the world. I get to serve voters, I get to serve the public but
over the last few years election administration has become harder,” she said.
“It’s raised a lot of questions for my team about how we keep in-person
election workers safe, how do we keep our staff safe and at the same time offer
the same levels of transparency in elections the public deserves.”
‘We haven’t had a break in about five years’
Across the
US the climate has grown so tense that one in five election workers has said
they are unlikely to remain in their positions through the next presidential
election, according to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice.
About one in six say they have been personally threatened.
Throughout
California, small but vocal groups inspired by uninformed or malevolent actors,
have been led to believe false narratives about how the state conducts
elections, Alexander, of the California Voter Foundation, said, prompting the
organization to make the safety of election workers increasingly a focus.
The group,
along with the Brennan Center, recently sponsored legislation signed into law
by the California governor that allows workers to keep their home addresses
confidential.
“I never
imagined when I started working on elections security almost 30 years ago that
it would include the physical security of people who run our elections,”
Alexander said.
But things
have changed rapidly, she said. Her organization is trying to support election
officials by providing de-escalation training and other resources to their
offices. More help is needed, and has been for a long time.
“The chronic
underfunding of election administration in the US is one of the conditions that
led to the vulnerability of our election workers. If the offices weren’t
understaffed and underresourced in the first place they would have more
security,” she said.
California
election offices were already challenged by back-to-back elections for the last
few years, including 2021’s recall election of the governor. Months after that,
Shasta county had its local recall election.
“We haven’t
had a break in about five years,” said Allen, who is also on the board of
directors for the California Voter Foundation. “None of my staff has been able
to really disconnect – not for any length of time. I can’t even go to the top
of Mount Lassen, where I know no one can get a hold of me.”
In the
past, demystifying the election process with guided tours of the office and a
walk-through of their procedures helped allay people’s fears, Allen said. This
year, the office is attempting to fight against the tide of misinformation and
disinformation with a steady trickle of good information publicized by her
office through social media and webinars, she said, attempting to reach the
voters they can. The county recently hired someone to work on voter education
and outreach.
But as
misinformation proliferates, there’s a growing contingency of people who won’t
believe any message coming out of the office, she said.
“I don’t
know how to dissuade people from a belief that they have swallowed wholesale
like it’s a religion,” she said. “We’ll still try.”
Still,
Allen remains hopeful things will get better. On a table in her office is a
stack of thank you cards from residents expressing gratitude for her office’s
work. She won re-election by a massive margin.
“In June,
all the folks who believe in some of this bad information about election fraud
and elections being stolen – six of those folks ran for office in June’s
election – and none of them won. Not one of them,” she said. “To me, that’s the
story: the voters of Shasta county saw through that.”
As far as
the national challenges for election workers, “this too shall pass,” Allen
said.
“I do think
it’s going to get worse before it gets better – but it will get better,” she
said.
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