The harassment in Maricopa County included threatening emails and social media posts, threats to share personal information online and photographing workers arriving at work, according to nearly 1,600 pages of documents obtained by Reuters through a public records request for security records and mail related to threats and harassment against election workers. Between July 11 and Aug. 22, the county elections office logged at least 140 threats and other hostile communications, records show. “You will all be executed,” said one. “Wire around their ends & tied & dragged by a car,” wrote another. The documents reveal the fallout of electoral conspiracy theories as voters nominated candidates in August to compete in the midterm elections. Many of the threats in Maricopa County, which helped President Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020, cited dismissed claims of fake ballots, rigged voting machines and corrupt election officials. Other jurisdictions nationwide have seen threats and harassment this year from supporters of the former president and prominent Republicans 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 embraced right-wing conspiracy theories. In Maricopa, a county of 4.5 million people that includes Phoenix, the harassment bothered some election officials, according to previously unreported incidents documented in emails and interviews with county officials. A number of temporary workers resigned after being arrested outside the central ballot counting center after the Aug. 2 primary, Stephen Richer, the county recorder who helps oversee Maricopa’s elections, said in an interview. A temporary worker 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. He was not a political figure, he told Richer. He just wanted a job. On August 3, unidentified men in plainclothes calling themselves “First Amendment Checkers” circled the elections department building, pointing cameras at employees and their license plates. Citizens pledged to continue monitoring until 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 being stalked,” Jarrett wrote.
THE ATTACKS CONTINUED
Since the 2020 election, Reuters has documented more than 1,000 intimidating messages to election officials across the country, including more than 120 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts. Many officials said they hoped the harassment would subside over time after the 2020 results were confirmed. But attacks have continued, fueled in many cases by right-wing media operatives and groups that continue without evidence to consider election officials as complicit in a massive conspiracy by China, Democratic officials and voter manufacturers to rob Trump of a second term. In April, local election officials in Arizona participated in a simulated violence exercise at a polling place in which several people were killed, according to an April 26 email from Lisa Marra, the president of Arizona Election Officials, which represents election administrators from 15 counties of the state. The exercise was intended to help officials prepare for election day violence and left participants “understandably disturbed,” 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 make elections safe for everyone.” Maricopa officials have appeared at times overwhelmed by threatening social media posts and right-wing message boards calling for the workers to be executed or hanged. Some messages sought officials’ home addresses, including one that promised “late night visits.” Employees were videotaped 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 pleading 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’re going to keep finding it harder and harder to get the job done when nobody wants to work for an election.” 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 recommend,” the agent wrote, “even if at this point no action has resulted.” The FBI declined to comment on the agent’s response to Moore. He also declined to confirm or deny the existence of ongoing investigations into the threats. Moore did not respond to requests for comment, but Richter, his boss, said in a statement that he greatly appreciates the FBI’s cooperation and vigilance. “This is an inherently emotional matter – communications of the most vile nature have been repeatedly sent to my team,” the statement said. An anonymous sender using the privacy-protecting email service ProtonMail had been sending “harassing emails” for nearly a year, Moore wrote in an Aug. 4 email to the FBI. A message warned Richer that he would be hanged as a traitor. “I would like to have a black and white poster in my office of you hanging from the end of a rope,” the sender wrote. The harassment and threats were affecting 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 elections.” In all, county officials referred at least 100 messages and social media posts to FBI and state counterterrorism officials. Reuters found no evidence in the mail that officials believed any of the messages violated the broad definition of constitutionally protected free speech and bordered on a prosecuted threat. The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on specific ongoing investigations, but said it has opened dozens of cases nationwide involving threats against election officials. Eight people face federal charges for making threats, including two that targeted Maricopa County officials. DOJ spokesman Joshua Stueve said that while the “vast majority” of complaints the agency receives “do not involve a threat of unlawful violence,” he said the messages are “often hostile, harassing and abusive” toward election officials and their staff. “They deserve better,” Stueve said.
ONLINE INSPIRATION
Misinformation on right-wing websites and social media fueled much of the animosity toward poll workers, according to internal messages among Maricopa officials. On July 31, Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump website with a history of publishing false stories, reported that a Maricopa County election official allowed a staff technician to gain unauthorized access to a computer server room where he deleted 2020 election data which was to be checked. The website published the names and photos of the official and the technician. readers responded with threats against both. “Until we start hanging these bad guys, nothing will change,” one reader wrote in the Gateway Pundit comments section. Another proposed death for computer technology specified in the story: “hang this impostor from (the) nearest tree so that people can see what happens to traitors.” The technology had not deleted anything, according to a Maricopa spokesman. The county’s director of elections had instructed him to shut down the server for delivery to the Arizona State Senate in response to a subpoena. A review of the server’s records confirmed that nothing was deleted, the spokesman told Reuters, and all data from the 2020 election had been archived and preserved months earlier. Election officials singled out in Gateway Pundit stories “tend to see a wave of targeting” for threats and harassing messages, Moore, the county’s information security officer, said in a Nov. 18, 2021, email to the FBI. Those stories, he added, are often “grossly inaccurate.” A Reuters investigation published last December found Gateway Pundit cited in more than 100 threatening and hostile communications directed at 25 election officials in the year after the 2020 election. Other far-right news outlets and commentators have drawn similarly hostile comments in response to their allegations against Maricopa officials. In August, right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk posted a Telegram comment accusing Richer, the county recorder, and his “partners” of turning Arizona’s election into “a Third World circus.” “When are we going to start hanging these people for treason?” a reader commented. Another simply added: “Kill them.” 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 waterproof film to windows and purchased more first aid kits, according to the documents. But the harassment continued. “This is only surpassed on the spot…
