WASHINGTON – “Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t.
In August, 42-year-old Travis Ford of Lincoln, Neb., Posted these words on the personal Instagram page of Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state and chief electoral officer. In a post 10 days later, Mr. Ford told Ms. Griswold that her security detail could not protect her, and then added:
“This world is unpredictable these days … anything can happen to anyone.”
Mr. Ford paid dearly for those words. Last week, in the U.S. District Court in Lincoln, he pleaded guilty to making a threat with a telecommunications device, a felony that can carry up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $ 250,000. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But a year after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland created the federal task force on electoral threats, almost no one else has faced punishment. Two more cases are being prosecuted, but Mr Ford’s conviction is the only case the working group has successfully concluded out of the more than 1,000 it has assessed.
Public reports of prosecutions by state and local officials are equally scarce, despite an explosion of intimidating and even violent threats against election workers, largely since former President Donald J. Trump began spreading the word. lie that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election.
Colorado alone has sent at least 500 threats against election workers to the task force, Ms. Griswold.
The slow pace has aroused consternation among both election workers and their supporters, some of whom say they are bitter at the thought of reporting threatening messages to prosecutors if nothing comes of it.
“The reaction is usually ‘Thank you for reporting; we’ll study it,’ and there’s no substantive follow-up to understanding what they’re doing,” said Meagan Wolfe, president of the National Association of State Election Directors. This makes some “feel that there is not adequate support that can deter people from doing so in the future,” he added.
The depth of election workers ’fear was underscored in this month’s hearings by the congressional panel investigating the January 6, 2021 aggression at the U.S. Capitol. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who are mother and daughter and both election workers in Atlanta, said they were forced into hiding by a barrage of threats in December 2020, after being falsely accused of electoral fraud by Rudy Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump. personal lawyer. Protesters tried to enter a relative’s house in search of the two. Eventually, they left office.
That’s not the norm, but it’s not uncommon either. Ms. Griswold said one Colorado County employee wears body armor to work and another does business behind bulletproof glasses.
“In my experience, if someone tells you over and over how they will hang you, they ask you for the size of your neck so you can cut the rope well, you have to take the threats very seriously,” he said. citing threats he had received.
Milwaukee City Secretary Claire Woodall-Vogg said she had “completely redesigned our City Hall office for security reasons” after receiving hundreds of threats, which she said had been sent to the task force.
A Reuters investigation in September found more than 100 death or violence threats to election officials in eight battle states, which at the time had resulted in four arrests and no convictions.
A March poll by the Brennan Justice Center found that one in six local election officials had suffered personal threats and nearly a third said they knew people who had left their jobs at least in part because of security concerns.
Justice Department officials declined to comment on the working group’s progress. The department has previously said the task force was tracking and recording election-related threats and, as a result, had opened dozens of criminal investigations. This led to charges in February against men in Texas and Nevada and the recent conviction in Nebraska.
The working group has also conducted training and education sessions on threats to electoral and state and local law enforcement officials and social media platforms. Each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has assigned an agent to collect and analyze threat reports, and federal prosecutors have been trained to assess and investigate threats.
The drip of prosecutions as a result of these movements is explained in part by federal law, which defines illegal threats in an extremely narrow way in the name of preserving the constitutional right to freedom of expression.
“You have to say something like,‘ I’m going to kill you. ’It can’t be‘ Someone should kill you, ’” said Catherine J. Ross, a First Amendment law professor and expert at George Washington University. “This is a very high bar, and intentionally a high bar.”
This so-called doctrine of true threat even classifies many extreme statements as protected political discourse. This rules out charges in many cases of threats against election officials, even when the recipients feel terrified by their lives.
Joanna Lydgate, founder and executive director of the bipartisan legal oversight organization States United Democracy Center, said she was encouraged to see the results of the working group and understood, “These cases can be difficult to present and take time.” .
She said: “We definitely hope to see more things from the DOJ, because investigating these threats, creating these cases and making people responsible is vital, especially when we look to the medium term.”
In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ office has reported more than 100 threats to the FBI over the past year, a spokeswoman, C. Murphy Hebert, said. Mrs. Hebert said he was confident the task force was reviewing these threats, but that could be a cold consolation for recipients who have not seen results.
“For the people you control and the people you’re targeting, a hundred messages that say‘ You should die ’are pretty threatening,” he said. “But from what we know of the process,” he said they are not actionable.
Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the threats sent to him last year included voice messages and online chats asking him, his wife and children were shot in the head. He said he had reported at least one threat to the FBI
But while the office has helped clarify how its threat review process works and has met with local employees, it said it still doesn’t know if its report was tracked.
“It doesn’t give much consolation to people who receive threats,” he said. “I’ve heard some say,‘ Why should I report it? It’s better that he carries the weapon with me and if something happens, at least I can do something to protect myself ‘”.
Other experts say the lack of action and transparency was undermining the main goal of the working group: to stop the epidemic of violent threats.
“Three prosecutions in a year for a widespread problem nationwide seems very low,” said David J. Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney who now heads the Center for Electoral Innovation and Research. non-profit. “Accurate or not, the impression among election officials is that the effort the Department of Justice launched a year ago is not doing the job.”
The Brennan Center report in March found that more than half of the threats against election officials who were surveyed had not been reported and that the vast majority of the threats were sent to local law enforcement agencies. the law, not to state or federal authorities.
Four out of 10 election officials said they had never heard of the working group. And while the Justice Department has increased attention to election officials and released a hotline that can be used to report complaints, “there are very few details about what happens when complaints are made,” he said. say Lawrence Norden, senior director of Center Elections. and Government Program.
“Election officials rightly believe that the public repercussions of these threats will be key to reducing them,” he said. But so far, there have been too few court cases to give the impression that criminals will be held accountable.
Until that changes, if he does, election officials need more reassurance that law enforcement will turn their backs on him, he and others said.
“You have a lot more election officials who are exercising their Second Amendment rights than before 2020,” said Crane, head of the Colorado secretaries association. “You just have to have one of these crazy people show up at your door.”