WASHINGTON — “Do you feel safe? You should not.”
In August, 42-year-old Travis Ford of Lincoln, Neb., posted those words to the personal Instagram page of Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state and chief election officer. In a message 10 days later, Mr. Ford told Ms Griswold that her security detail failed to protect her, adding:
“This world is unpredictable these days…anything can happen to anyone.”
Mr. Ford paid a lot for those words. Last week, he pleaded guilty in US court in Lincoln to threatening a telecommunications device, a misdemeanor that carries 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 Election Threats Task Force, hardly anyone else was punished. Two other cases are being prosecuted, but Mr. Ford is the only case the task force has successfully completed of the more than 1,000 it has evaluated.
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 lie that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election.
Colorado alone has forwarded at least 500 threats against election workers to the task force, Ms Griswold said.
The slow pace has caused consternation among election workers and their supporters alike, some of whom say they are bitter about the idea of reporting the threatening messages to prosecutors if nothing comes of it.
“The response is usually, ‘Thank you for reporting; we’ll look into it,” and there’s no substantive follow-up to understand what they’re doing,” said Meagan Wolfe, the president of the National Association of State Election Directors. That leads some to “feel there isn’t enough support that could stop people from doing this in the future,” she added.
The deep fear of election workers was underlined in hearings this month by the congressional panel investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, mother and daughter and both Atlanta election officials, said they were forced into hiding by a barrage of threats in December 2020 after being falsely accused of voter fraud by Rudy Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump. used to be. personal lawyer. Protesters tried to break into a relative’s home in search of the two. They eventually resigned from their positions.
That’s not the norm, but it’s not uncommon either. Ms. Griswold said one clerk in Colorado wears a bulletproof vest to work, and another does business behind bulletproof glass.
“In my experience, if someone tells you over and over how they are going to hang you, and asks you how big your neck is so they can cut the rope properly, you have to take the threats very seriously,” she said, stating of threats she had received.
Milwaukee city clerk Claire Woodall-Vogg said she “completely redecorated our city hall office for security reasons” after receiving hundreds of threats, which she said had been forwarded to the task force.
A Reuters investigation in September revealed more than 100 death threats or violence against election officials in eight battlefield states, which had resulted in four arrests and no convictions at the time.
A March survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found that one in six local election officials had been personally threatened, and nearly a third said they knew people who had left their jobs at least partially due to security concerns.
Justice Department officials declined to comment on the task force’s progress. The department has previously said the task force tracked and logged election-related threats, opening dozens of criminal investigations as a result. That led to charges against men from Texas and Nevada in February and the recent conviction in Nebraska.
The task force also conducted training and education sessions on threats to state and local law enforcement and election officials and social media platforms. Each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has an agent assigned to collect and analyze threat reports, and federal prosecutors are trained in threat assessment and investigation.
The trickle of prosecutions in the wake of those steps is explained in part by federal law, which defines illegal threats extremely narrowly in the name of preserving the constitutional right to free speech.
“You should say something like, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ It can’t be ‘Someone should kill you,’” said Catherine J. Ross, a professor and expert on First Amendment law at George Washington University. “That’s a very high bar, and an intentionally high bar.”
That so-called doctrine of true threats even classifies many extreme statements as protected political expressions. That rules out accusations in many cases of threats against election officials — even when the recipients are terrified for their lives.
Joanna Lydgate, founder and chief executive officer of the bipartisan legal watchdog organization United States Democracy Center, said she was encouraged to see the results of the task force and understood, “These cases can be challenging to bring and they take time.”
She said, “We certainly hope to see more of this from DOJ because it’s critical to research these threats, build these cases, and hold people accountable, especially as we look at the midterms.”
In Arizona, the office of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has reported more than 100 threats to the FBI in the past year, said a spokeswoman, C. Murphy Hebert. Ms. Hebert said she was confident the task force was assessing these threats, but it could be cold comfort to recipients who haven’t seen results.
“For the people who are monitoring and the people being targeted, 100 messages saying ‘You should die’ are quite threatening,” she said. “But based on what we know of the process,” they are not feasible, she said.
Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said threats sent to him in the past year included voicemail and online chatter urging a bullet through the head of him, his wife and children. He said he reported at least one threat to the FBI
But while the agency has helped clarify how the threat assessment process works and met with local clerks, he said, he still doesn’t know if his report has been followed up.
“It doesn’t bring much comfort to the people who receive threats,” he said. “I’ve heard some say, ‘Why should I report it? I’d better just have my gun with me and if something happens, at least I can do something to protect myself.’”
Other experts say the lack of both action and transparency undermined the task force’s primary goal: to stop the epidemic of violent threats.
“Three prosecutions in a year for an issue that is nationally widespread seems very low,” said David J. Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney who now heads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “Whether correct or not, the impression among election officials is that the effort launched by the Justice Department a year ago with much fanfare is not getting the job done.”
The Brennan Center’s March report found that more than half of the threats against election officials surveyed went unreported, and a vast majority of threats were forwarded to local law enforcement agencies, not state or federal law enforcement agencies.
Four in ten election officials said they had never heard of the task force. And while the Justice Department has increased contact with election officials and published a hotline that can be used to report complaints, “there are really very few details about what happens when complaints are made,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior executive. director of the center’s elections. and government program.
“Election officials rightly believe that the public repercussions for these threats will be critical to contain them,” he said. But so far there have been too few lawsuits to give any idea that violators will be held accountable.
Until that changes — if it does — election officials need more reassurance that law enforcement is behind them, he and others said.
“You have a lot more election officials exercising their Second Amendment rights than you did before 2020,” said Mr. Crane, the head of the Colorado Clerk’s Association. “It only takes one of these crazy people to show up at your door.”