Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice created a task force to field reports of threats and harassment against the country’s election workers. As of April, the group had received more than 2,000 complaints. Only about 100 warranted investigation, officials said. Far fewer cleared the threshold for prosecution. Most threatening messages, it turns out, are protected under the First Amendment.

“A true threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence,” John Keller, head of the Election Threat Task Force, said in April. “If they don’t cross that line into invoking violence, they are generally not going to constitute a criminally prosecutable threat.”

Just trying to perform the act of democracy, thanks. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Unsurprisingly, the threats have not abated. Neither has the fear among election workers. More than half of local election officials say they’re worried about the safety of their staff, about the same number as in 2022. Roughly a quarter had specific concerns about being assaulted at home or at work. Given the lackluster response from law enforcement, those fears are understandable, advocates told our national bureau.

“Election officials by and large have no confidence that if something were to happen to them, there would be any consequences,” said Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. “It is very clear that we are not seeing a deterrent effect.”

Election-related threats have run the gamut since 2020, ranging from requests to access voting machines to coordinated harassment campaigns. During the 2022 primary in South Carolina, groups of right-wing activists descended on polling places to harangue, photograph and film election workers. They’d planned it all ahead of time with the help of an election-denying Republican, who wished the groups “good hunting” the night before the election.

“We have the enemy on their back foot, press the attack,” he wrote on a conservative social media site. “Forward.”

                   A lot of signs. No exit ramp. (Photo via Getty images)

Local officials “took that threat pretty seriously,” according to Aaron Cramer, executive director of the Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections. His office reported the incident to state officials and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They never heard back.

“I don’t know what the conclusions were, or what occurred after submitting that information,” Cramer said.

Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales flipped that script last week, telling a county elections board it did not have the authority to ban a Republican poll worker accused of intimidating a voter during the state’s primary contest in May. The ban, he wrote in a May 29 letter, is “unenforceable,” per the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

It’s an interesting stance for Morales, the architect of a “Blow the Whistle” initiative meant to bolster “threat awareness” among poll workers and voters in hopes of avoiding election interference. The incident in Perry County is the only challenge reported in Indiana since then, according to Don Knebel, president of ReCenter Indiana Inc.

“There’s a huge gap between what Morales says and what he does,” Knebel said. “It’s also clear that the secretary of state is not interested in election interference if that interference is coming from Republicans.”

        Success not guaranteed! (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The drama began May 7, when Bradley DeHart requested a Republican ballot for his first-ever Indiana primary. He’d checked in to vote when poll worker Sherri Flynn confiscated his voting ticket and then began to fill out a challenge form after deeming it “highly unlikely” that DeHart was a Republican. (His partner is a Democrat.) Flynn then requested DeHart’s signature on the form, which he refused to provide.

“I specifically told her that ‘I did not feel safe’ in her presence due to her intimidating, aggressive demeanor and hostility she was expressing toward me,” DeHart wrote in a complaint to the Perry County Election Board. “She proceeded to state to everyone in the room that, if I cast a vote without signing the form, then it was considered ‘election fraud,’ and then stated that if my vote was counted, ‘the entire election would have to be redone.’”

The board sided with DeHart, voting unanimously to ban Flynn from serving in future elections — something it did not have the authority to do, according to Morales, who also chastised the panel for failing to notify Flynn of the hearing. Anyone “aggrieved by the actions of the board” should escalate the case to the Indiana Election Commission, he said.

High chance this is somehow against the law. (Photo by Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline)

Other red-state Republicans are similarly focused on election security, if your definition of “election security” includes “weeding out imaginary voter fraud by making it harder for actual, real people to register to vote.” New laws on the books in at least seven states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Texas — impose new restrictions on third-party groups seeking to communicate with and register voters, with hefty penalties for confirmed violations, Stateline reported.

The timing of the push comes on the heels of record-breaking registration efforts by third-party groups during the pandemic, which contributed to one of the highest turnouts in a presidential election in decades. That’s not a coincidence, according to advocates, who framed the laws as a blatant attempt to dampen participation among voters who are likely to back Democrats.

“It’s a huge chilling effect on the organizations who are doing this work, and on voters,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, which has led lawsuits on behalf of the League of Women Voters chapters and other groups in Florida, Alabama and Missouri.

             Start here! (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)

Consider Florida, where more than 350 groups have registered as third-party voter registration organizations in just the past five years. Under the newly enacted law, any that employ noncitizen volunteers are now subject to a $50,000 fine per volunteer, even those that have green cards. Groups are also barred from using volunteers with certain felony convictions on elections-related charges or for fraud, forgery or perjury. The state can also fine groups up to $250,000 per year in piecemeal penalties for things like turning in voter applications past the deadline or maintaining a database of registrants’ personal information for future outreach.

Many that focus on young people or historically marginalized communities have had to change their procedures to avoid fines and felony charges. Others have stopped registration drives altogether.

“Those fees can stack up a lot more aggressively and just bankrupt your organization,” said state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani, a Democrat and founder of People Power for Florida. “Every day, I’m bracing for some sort of incorrect and burdensome fine.”

Republicans defended the policy as a necessary safeguard against nefarious groups seeking to take advantage of would-be voters by failing to submit their registration in a timely fashion or being careless with their personal information.

“Every cycle … there’s additional issues that arise with these organizations, which is prompting the additional need for enhanced measures of protection,” Republican state Sen. Danny Burgess, who chairs the Ethics and Elections Committee, told a local NBC affiliate in south Florida in April 2023, after he and his colleagues passed the measure.