For election workers, the fentanyl-laced letters signal a challenging year

For the people organizing elections at thousands of local offices across the country, 2024 was never going to be an easy year. But the recent anonymous mailing of powder-filled envelopes to election offices in five states offers new clues about how difficult it could be.

The letters, sent this month to offices in Washington state, Oregon, Nevada, California and Georgia, are being investigated by the US Postal Inspection Service and the FBI. Several appear to be laced with fentanyl; at least two contained a vague message calling for “end the election now.”

The letters are a public indicator of what some election officials say is a new increase in threats to their security and the functioning of the election system. And they predict the pressure-cooker climate that election officials will face next year in a battle for the White House that could determine the future course of American democracy.

“The system will be tested in every way possible, whether it’s voter registration, ballot applications, poll workers, the mail, drop boxes, election results websites,” said Tammy Patrick, CEO of Programs at the National Association of Election Officials. “Every way our elections are run will be tested sometime in 2024.”

Ms. Patrick and other experts said they were confident that those staffing the next election would weather these tensions, just as pollsters navigated a 2020 vote at the height of a global pandemic that virtually changed the script for national elections. rewrote.

But they didn’t downplay the challenges. Instead, they said, in some crucial ways — such as the escalation of violent political rhetoric and the increasing number of veteran election officials throwing in the towel — the coming election year will bring greater tensions than in any past.

By various measures, an unprecedented number of top election officials have retired or quit since 2020, many in response to mounting threats and partisan interference in their jobs.

An annual survey shows that turnover from election jobs has doubled in the past year released last week By the Information center for elections and voting at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Nearly a third of election officials said they knew someone who left an election post at least in part because of safety fears.

Another recent report by Issue One, a democracy advocacy group, said 40 percent of top election administrators in 11 Western states — totaling more than 160 officials, typically in provincial positions — have retired or quit since 2020.

“They feel unsafe,” said Aaron Ockerman, executive director of the Ohio Association of Election Officials. “They have high amounts of stress. They feel disrespected by the state or the public. So they look for other work.”

A certain number of departures is normal and in many cases experienced subordinates can take over the tasks.

But departures can cause collateral damage: Promoting an insider to an election job leaves a vacancy open at a time when it’s increasingly difficult to recruit newcomers to a profession that’s only becoming more stressful. Experts also worry that the aura of trouble and even danger attached to election work will drive away volunteers, many of them older Americans, who are essential to elections in all but the handful of states where residents vote largely by mail.

Each election requires many hundreds of thousands of volunteers to staff the polling stations. At a recent meeting of election administrators, about half were “really concerned” about raising enough aid for next year’s elections, said David J. Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Researcha nonprofit organization in Washington, DC

Like Ms. Patrick of the Association of Election Officials, Mr. Becker said he expected any staffing problems during next year’s election season to be localized and not widespread. For example, he noted that groups new to recruiting poll workers, such as sports teams, universities and private companies, help find volunteers.

One wildcard is the extent to which threats against election workers and other attempts to disrupt the vote will increase as the political atmosphere around the presidency begins.

Intimidation and threats against election officials were widely reported in the months after former President Donald J. Trump began falsely claiming that fraud cost him a victory in the 2020 election. But election officials say the threats have not stopped since then.

In June, the office of Paul López, the Denver clerk and recorder, was attacked overnight with a hail of bullets, which pockmarked the building’s facade and a ballot box and entered an office cubicle through a window. And from mid-July to mid-August, the Maricopa County elections office in Phoenix recorded 140 violent threats, including one warning that officials would be “tied up and dragged by a car.” Reuters reported this.

The challenges go beyond the threat of demands that can make the demands of the job seem limitless.

Over the past year, for example, election offices across the country have been bombarded with requests, mostly from election skeptics and allies of Mr. Trump, for millions of pages of public records related to voter rolls and internal election operations. Similarly, offices in some states were hit this year by challenges to the legitimacy of thousands of voter registrations.

In both cases, the ostensible purpose was to serve as a check on the integrity of the ballot. The practical effect – and sometimes the intention, experts say – has been to disrupt election preparations and, in some cases, make it harder for some people to vote.

“It impacts thousands of election officials,” Ms. Patrick said. “It’s not that those driving the story are numerous. But we know that there are large numbers of people listening to them and repeating what they hear.”

Some of the language used falls outside the boundaries of normal political discourse.

Mr. Trump, in a speech in New Hampshire this month, used language more consistent with fascism than democracy when he threatened to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs who are living like vermin within its borders.” of our country. who lie, steal and cheat in elections.”

Such toxic language has an effect, he said Rachel Kleinfeldan expert on political violence and the rule of law at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC

“There is a very clear connection between the rhetoric of politicians and other leaders who dehumanize and position another group as a threat to incidents of political violence,” she said. “Trump himself seems to have a special talent for this.”

“What is distressing,” Ms. Kleinfeld added, “is not only that election officials are quite concerned about these threats, but that they don’t disappear” in what should have been a quiet period between national elections.

Mrs. Patrick said she was also upset. “I feel like we are in a very uncertain time, but there are bright lights out there,” she said. “In 2022, we had candidates who lost and conceded admirably and politely. This month we saw people continuing to serve as poll workers and people raising their hands to run for office on platforms of truth and legitimacy. As long as we have people who are willing to believe in facts, we will get through this.”