Nearly a year after the 2020 presidential contest, election officials who stood up to then-President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud are still grappling with death threats.
Election officials and aides in Arizona and other states targeted by Trump told CNN about living in constant terror “nervously watching the people around them at events, checking in their rearview mirrors for cars following them home and sitting up at night wondering what might happen next.”
And when it comes to female officials, the attacks are particularly vile.
“Bullet,” read one tweet directed at Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, CNN reports. “That is a six letter word for you.”
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“I’m really jonesing to see your purple face after you’ve been hanged,” one email says. Another message says “the drug is going to be wondering where you went and your husband will have to tell it that you were hung for treason.”
“I am a hunter —and I think you should be hunted,” a woman can be heard saying in a voicemail left for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in September, CNN reports. “You will never be safe in Arizona again,” the woman added.
Griswold says the threats are getting worse and has asked for more protection. She’s getting messages like “I’m watching you sleep” and “I know where you live.”
“They are posting my address and telling me repeatedly how they’re going to kill me,” She says.
CNN noted that “the situation got so bad for Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, that during periods when the threats against her have spiked and gotten specific, she had to be assigned periodic 24-hour police protection.”
“It creates an air of apprehension everywhere you go and over everything you do. You’re always looking behind your back and over your shoulder,” she said.
But the threats are not exclusively to Democrats or women. In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger face threats as well, after standing up to former President Trump’s baseless claims of fraud, but among the most disturbing were those directed at members of his family, CNN reports.
“Sending your wife sexualized text and all that other kind of insulting garbage and then breaking into your data loss, you know, townhouse and leaving the lights on and you know that they were there, and then drive them by our house,” Raffensperger said. “And so those kinds of things are, you know, stuff that you notice. You do look over your shoulder. And that was all just ginned up all by lies.”
An analysis published by Reuters last month found that out of 102 threats of death or violence made against election officials, it could only confirm four had led to arrests.
