Death threats are now part of Election Administrators job

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Jared Dearing, the director of Kentucky’s Board of Elections, had little to do with Louisville, the state’s largest city, having only one polling place for the June 28 primary. It was a county decision, and it made sense. In-person turnout was expected to be low during the pandemic. The polling place, a convention center, offered multiple locations to cast ballots, and transportation by bus there was free.

Nevertheless, as luminaries from LeBron James to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., tweeted in outrage about the supposed disenfranchisement of Louisville voters, threats poured into Dearing’s office. “You’re too scared to answer your phone,” one man said in a voicemail message from a blocked number. “Go find a gun and kill yourself. Every person that didn’t get to vote because of you should get to beat the s**t out of you.” The man, who identified himself as a Washington, D.C., resident, expressed hope that Dearing, a “bigoted whore,” would be mangled in a flaming car crash.

In another voicemail, the same caller predicted that every member of Dearing’s staff, whom he called “evil f***s,” would be damned for eternity. “Y’all are going to hell. God sees you. He sees you committing voter suppression, and that is a mortal sin.”

Such abuse isn’t limited to Kentucky. Across the country, election administrators and their staffs are facing unprecedented attacks, much of it from outside their jurisdictions, from both left- and right-wing voters and activists. The polarization of American politics has reached such a fever pitch that the bureaucrats who operate the machinery of democracy — and largely lack the authority to change it — are harassed and threatened in language that would be out of place even if they were candidates espousing extremist views. This pressure, along with health concerns, is prompting an unusually large number of election officials to step down, thinning the ranks of experienced administrators at a turbulent time when they are dealing with record numbers of absentee ballot applications, which in most places must be processed by hand.

Dearing, a Democrat who supports voting by mail during the pandemic, stayed on the job, but he was rattled. “It was disturbing,” he said of the threats. “Elections are always tense, but this year was something different. There is a new and increasing level of acrimony, specifically directed at administrators.”

In Washoe County, Nevada, a mailed-in ballot for the state’s May primary had “SEALED WITH COVID SPIT” written on the outside of the envelope. “We took that as a threat,” said Deanna Spikula, the county’s registrar of voters. The ballot was not counted, and the envelope was turned over to police. There was insufficient evidence to bring charges against the sender, said Michelle Bays, chief investigator for the Washoe County district attorney’s office.

In Evansville, Indiana, after an activist named Janet Reed sent out hundreds of absentee ballot applications in May that allegedly sought to deceive voters into registering as Democrats, recipients who assumed that she worked for the elections office began to flood its phone lines with furious accusations of malfeasance.

“We have received many calls at the election office irate with our staff, and [they] think it’s our fault that this is happening,” County Clerk Carla Hayden told the Election Board in a May meeting. “They’ve been cursed at. They’ve been hung up on — all kinds of things, which is really unfortunate because they’re working very, very hard and helping extra hours. And some of it has to do with trying to fix this error that someone else made.” Reed, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been charged with felony election fraud.