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Nov 6 (Reuters) – Election workers in Arizona’s most hotly contested district faced more than 100 threats of violence and intimidating communications in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, most of them based on campaign conspiracy theories promoted by the former president Donald Trump and his allies.
Harassment in Maricopa County included threatening emails and social media posts, threats to share personal information online and photographing employees arriving at work, according to nearly 1,600 pages of documents obtained by Reuters through a public records request for security records and correspondence. related to threats and harassment against election officials.
Between July 11 and Aug. 22, the county elections office documented at least 140 threats and other hostile messages, records show. “You will all be executed,” said one. “Fenced with wire around their limbs and tied and dragged from a car,” wrote another.
The documents reveal the fallout from election conspiracy theories as voters nominated candidates in August to compete in midterm elections. Many of the threats in Maricopa County that helped President Joe Biden win over Trump in 2020 invoked debunked claims of fake ballots, rigged voting machines and corrupt election officials.
Other jurisdictions across the country have seen threats and harassment this year from supporters of the former president and prominent Republican figures questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, according to interviews with Republican and Democratic election officials in 10 states.
The threats come at a time of growing concern about the risk of political violence, highlighted by the Oct. 28 attack on the husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a man who espouses right-wing conspiracy theories.
In Maricopa, a county of 4.5 million people that includes Phoenix, the harassment has unnerved some election workers, according to previously unreported incidents documented in emails and interviews with county officials.
A number of temporary workers quit after being visited outside the main ballot counting center after the Aug. 2 primary election, Stephen Richer, the county recorder who helps monitor Maricopa elections, said in an interview. A temporary employee broke down in tears after a stranger took a picture of her, according to an email from Richer to county officials. The unidentified worker left work early and never returned.
She wasn’t a political person, she told Reacher. She just wanted a job.
On Aug. 3, strangers in tactical gear calling themselves “First Amendment Auditors” toured the Department of Elections building, pointing cameras at employees and their license plates. People pledged to continue monitoring through the midterm elections, according to an Aug. 4 email from Scott Jarrett, Maricopa’s director of elections, to county officials.
“It feels very much like predatory behavior and that we are being hunted,” Jarrett wrote.
THE ATTACKS CONTINUED
Since the 2020 election, Reuters has documented more than 1,000 threatening messages to election officials across the country, including more than 120 that could warrant criminal prosecution, according to legal experts.
Many officials said they had hoped the harassment would decrease over time after the 2020 results were confirmed. But the attacks continue, fueled in many cases by right-wing media figures and groups who continue to portray, without evidence, election officials as complicit in a vast conspiracy by China, Democratic Party officials and voting equipment manufacturers to rob Trump of a second presidential term .
In April, local election officials in Arizona participated in an exercise simulating violence at a polling station in which several people were killed, according to an April 26 email from Lisa Mara, president of Arizona Election Officials, which represents election administrators from the state’s 15 counties. . The exercise was meant to help officials prepare for Election Day violence and left participants “understandably anxious,” the email to more than a dozen local election directors said.
In a statement, Marra said, “This is just one more tool we can use to ensure elections are safe for everyone.”
Maricopa employees sometimes seemed overwhelmed by threatening social media posts and right-wing message boards calling for employees to be executed or hanged. Some messages sought employees’ home addresses, including one that promised “late evening visits.” Employees were filmed arriving and leaving work, according to emails between county officials.
Two days after the Aug. 2 primary, the county’s information security officer emailed the FBI asking for help.
“I appreciate the limitations of what the FBI can do, but I just want to point this out,” wrote Michael Moore, information security officer for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. “Our staff are being intimidated and threatened,” he added. “We will continue to find it increasingly difficult to get the job done when no one wants to work for elections.”
An FBI special agent acknowledged the agency’s limitations, according to the emails. “As you put it, we are limited in what we can do — we only investigate violations of federal law,” the FBI agent responded in an Aug. 4 email. Reporting threats to local law enforcement is “the only thing I can suggest,” the agent wrote, “even if it doesn’t lead to any action at this point.”
The FBI declined to comment on Moore’s agent’s response. He also declined to confirm or deny the existence of ongoing investigations into the threats.
Moore did not respond to requests for comment, but Richer, his boss, said in a statement that he appreciated the FBI’s partnership and vigilance. “This is an inherently emotional subject – communications of the most vile nature have been repeatedly sent to my team,” the statement said.
One anonymous sender using the privacy-protecting email service ProtonMail had been sending “harassment emails” for nearly a year, Moore wrote in an Aug. 4 email to the FBI. One message warned Reacher that he would be “hanged as a traitor.”
“I would like to have a black and white poster in my office of you hanging on the end of a rope,” the sender wrote.
Harassment and threats take a toll on the mental health of poll workers, Jarrett wrote in his Aug. 4 memo. “If our permanent and temporary staff do not feel safe, we will not be able (to) recruit and retain staff for the upcoming election.”
In total, county officials have referred at least 100 messages and social media posts to the FBI and state counterterrorism officials. Reuters found no evidence in the correspondence that officials considered any of the messages to violate the broad definition of constitutionally protected free speech and cross into the territory of a threat subject to criminal prosecution.
The US Justice Department declined to comment on specific ongoing investigations, but said it has opened dozens of cases across the country involving threats to poll workers. Eight people face federal charges for making threats, including two directed at Maricopa County officials.
Justice Department spokesman Joshua Stuve said that while the “vast majority” of complaints the agency receives “do not involve threats of unlawful violence,” he said the messages are “often hostile, harassing and offensive” to election officials and their staff. “They deserve better,” Stuve said.
ONLINE INSPIRATION
Misinformation on right-wing websites and social media fuels much of the animosity toward election staff, according to internal reports among Maricopa officials.
On July 31, Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump website with a history of publishing false stories, reported that an election official in Maricopa County allowed a staff technician to gain unauthorized access to a computer server room where he deleted 2020 election data. which have been audited. The website publishes the names and photos of the official and technician; readers responded with threats against the two.
“Until we start hanging these evildoers, nothing will change,” one reader wrote in the Gateway Pundit comments section. Another death sentence for computer technology identified in the story: “hang this crook from the (nearest) tree so people can see what happens to traitors.”
The technology didn’t erase anything, according to a Maricopa spokesperson. The county’s director of elections had instructed him to shut down the server to be delivered to the Arizona State Senate in response to a subpoena. A review of the server’s records confirmed that nothing had been deleted, the Reuters spokesman said, and all data from the 2020 election had been backed up and saved months earlier.
Election officials named in Gateway Pundit stories “tend to see a spike in being targeted” for threats and harassing messages, Moore, the county’s information security officer, said in a Nov. 18, 2021, email to the FBI. stories, he added, are often “grossly inaccurate.” A Reuters investigation published last December found that Gateway Pundit was cited in more than 100 threatening and hostile messages targeting 25 poll workers in the year after the 2020 election.
Other right-wing news outlets and commentators have sparked similarly hostile comments in response to their accusations against Maricopa officials. In August, right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk posted a Telegram comment accusing Reacher, the county clerk, and “his cronies” of turning the Arizona election into a “Third World circus.”
“When are we going to start hanging these people for treason?” commented one reader. Another simply added: “Kill them.”
The Gateway Pundit and Kirk did not respond to requests for comment.
After a security assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in late 2021, Maricopa reinforced doors, added shatterproof film on windows and purchased more first aid kits, according to the documents.
But the harassment continues.
“This goes beyond just on-site security. This is a mental health issue,” Jarrett, the county elections director, wrote in an email to county officials two days after the primary.
“I have a lot of respect for free speech and I welcome public scrutiny,” Jarrett added. “However, allowing this predatory activity harms and threatens the viability of the Elections Department.”
Reporting by Linda So, Peter Eisler and Jason Schepp; Editing by Suzanne Goldenberg
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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