ELECTION SECURITYState and Local Election Workers Quitting Amid Abuse, Officials Tell U.S. Senate Panel
State and local election officials face threats and intimidation, driving experienced workers out of the profession. State and local election workers quitting amid abuse. Conspiracy theories have fueled a more hostile environment for election workers, which has led many to quit, creating more challenges for the inexperienced new leaders.
State and local election officials face threats and intimidation, driving experienced workers out of the profession, a panel of election officials told a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday.
Conspiracy theories have fueled a more hostile environment for election workers, which has led many to quit, creating more challenges for the inexperienced new leaders, the top election officials from two battleground states testified at a U.S. Senate Rules and Administration Committee hearing on threats to election administration.
Democratic and Republican election workers have been the targets of “threats and abusive conduct,” Rules Committee Chair Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said.
Senators stressed the bipartisan nature of the issue and neither members of the committee nor the election administrator witnesses — which included state officials from Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nebraska and the Rutherford County, Tennessee, administrator of elections — mentioned former President Donald Trump or his unfounded attempts to discredit the 2020 election results that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Congress must “continue the federal funding and to make clear this is a bipartisan, nonpartisan piece of the work that we do,” Klobuchar said.
“In recent years, election officials have faced both cybersecurity threats and physical threats,” the panel’s ranking Republican, Nebraska’s Deb Fischer, said. “They have struggled to retain experienced poll workers and to recruit and train new poll workers.”
Retention ‘one of the biggest challenges’
Threats against election workers and related issues have worsened since 2020, senators and witnesses said.
Twelve of Arizona’s 15 counties lost their chief election official in the last three years, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told the committee.
“As a former county recorder myself, I can attest that the pre-2020 world for election administrators is gone,” he said. “We don’t feel safe in our work because of the harassment and threats that are based in lies.”
He urged action to combat the misinformation that has led to distrust of election officials, calling it a “threat to American democracy.”
“Many veteran Arizona officials from both political parties … have left the profession for the sake of their own physical, mental and emotional health and that of their families,” Fontes said. “The cost of persistent misrepresentations about the integrity of our elections is high, but the cost of inaction against those threats is higher.”