Election officials stressed or quitting because of threats

Election officials say they're receiving threats to their lives and their children's lives, and many are quitting, Stephanie Sy and Geoffrey Lou Guray report for PBS's "NewsHour."

Many are in rural areas, including Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor of Bartow County, an Atlanta exurb. He told PBS: "I had a phone call after the 2020 presidential election before the January runoff from someone from a different state, who called to inform me how horrible of a person I was, how I was letting the country down, because she wasn't happy with the results of the election in a county that her candidate won by a large margin."

Michelle Carew, the outgoing elections administrator of Hood County, Texas, pop. 62,000, said she's quitting after doing elections work for 14 years because she can't take it anymore. "While attending the Election Commission meeting back in July, it was a two-hour-long meeting. The public was allowed to come in and speak and talk about things that they felt like I was not doing correctly as an elections administrator. They questioned my integrity," she told PBS. "I just don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be a part of these unfounded truths, these constant lies, the constant scrutiny."

Natalie Adona, the assistant county clerk recorder for Nevada County, California, said a voter called her, upset that state laws don't always require photo ID for voting. When she listed for him the safeguards in the law to thwart fraud and told him her job was to follow the law, he told her that Nazis also followed laws blindly and asked her how she could live with herself. "That was really hard to hear."

Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor to The Democracy Fund's elections program and a former elections official in Maricopa County, Arizona, told PBS that the threats are "exemplary of what I’m hearing from all across the country," from both Trump and Biden counties. "we’re seeing a systemic rise in the number of vacancies . . . because of the pressure and the mental toll it’s taking on them." Republican candidates, including incoming Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, now routinely question the legitimacy of an election if they were to lose, even in local races, Patrick said.

"Across the country, officials are noting 'an unusually large number of retirements,' as Kentucky Secretary of State Michael G. Adams (R) said of the departure rate of county clerks in his commonwealth," Talking Points Memo reports. In testimony to the Senate Rules Committee last week, Adams said two of the state's 120 clerks resigned last year, not because they were threatened or harrassed, but because "they had had enough; they were exhausted." This year, 15 clerks are retiring an "unusually large number. . . . It’s a harder job now to run an election," partly because of changes made during the pandemic to make voting easier.

The high turnover rate is "a double-edged problem," legal scholar and law professor Rick Hasen told TPM: "On the one hand, you’re losing the competent people, on the other hand, you’re potentially bringing in more people who are not committed to the fairness of the process, but have an allegiance to a particular candidate."