Earlier this week, the office of Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was one of more than a dozen election offices across the county to receive a mysterious package filled with white powder, the return address labeled: "U.S. Traitor Elimination Army." The incident prompted the FBI to open an investigation into the latest in a string of threats to election officials in an increasingly toxic political environment.
To Griswold, 39, threats like this are nothing out of the ordinary. As the overseer of election administration and procedures, Griswold has received nearly 1,000 violent threats in the last year, ranging from physically threatening and sexually explicit messages, to graphic threats to her life and her family.
“It's scary when someone is telling you over and over graphically how they are going to kill you and your family. It's very scary,” Griswold, who gave birth to her first child in August, said in an interview with Salon. "It's an attack on democracy. The threats are part of the far right's effort to try to intimidate secretaries of state and election workers who stand up for democracy. And for my part, I won't be intimidated. I refuse to give in."
Before former President Donald Trump and his allies attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, administering elections was hardly a dangerous job, Griswold said. But over the last four years, and particularly since the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the task of ensuring free and fair elections has become increasingly strenuous.
“To be very clear, Donald Trump has created this threat environment,” Griswold said, pointing to Trump’s many threats to prosecute and jail election officials who oppose him. “If election workers do not feel safe doing their jobs, that puts democracy at risk."
Since June 2021, the FBI has received more than 1,000 tips related to threats to election officials, 11% of which were serious enough to be further investigated, according to a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center. There has been an elevated number of threats to election workers in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin, in particular, all states where President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was challenged with baseless claims of widespread fraud.
This environment has resulted in an unprecedented number of election officials leaving their jobs, taking with them their years of experience and knowledge.
Across the country, more than a third of all top election officials have quit or retired since 2020 and there has been a 36% turnover rate in election overseers, according to an investigation by CBS News. In Colorado, nearly 40% of election workers are new since 2020.
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When Griswold, a Colorado native, first ran to be her state's top elections official in 2017, she was concerned about Trump and his anti-democratic rhetoric. But she had no idea how bad things would get and just how important her role would become.
Before 2020, officials like Griswold were largely unknown. But as threats to the country’s democratic process have grown, so has their visibility.
“The role has changed from administering elections to protecting democracy,” she said.
After Griswold began receiving death threats herself, she was at first hesitant to speak out as a woman and the youngest secretary of state in Colorado history. She did not want to appear weak or vulnerable, but eventually realized there was strength in transparency.
“Ultimately, the American people need to know what’s going on, because the threat environment is a large part of the attempted dismantling of American democracy,” she told Salon. Speaking up is “important to create an atmosphere” for prosecutors to take threats to election workers seriously, she added.
In 2021, the Department of Justice created a task force dedicated to protecting the safety of election workers. However, just 20 people have been charged with threatening election officials since then, out of roughly 2,000 threats flagged to the FBI, according to figures released by the bureau.
As November’s election looms large and the threat environment grows, election offices in swing states across the country are implementing unprecedented safety measures, including bulletproof glass, panic buttons and deescalation training to protect both workers and voting procedures.
In Colorado, Griswold said her team is prepared and confident in the state’s “gold standard” of election administration. In April, Colorado became one of the first states to explicitly make it a felony to serve as a fake elector, for example (in 2020, Trump allies attempted to present Congress with false slates of pro-Trump electors to overturn the election). The state has also outlawed guns at the polls and any “unwarranted illegal behavior” towards election officials will be taken “very seriously,” Griswold said.
"I think, to a degree, the threat environment can backfire, because at the end of the day, Americans believe in free and fair elections, and the idea that election officials would be threatened with their life or doing their job, I think, is egregious," Griswold said.
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