Inside the office of the Shasta county clerk and registrar of voters, which runs elections for about 111,000 people in this part of far northern California, Cathy Darling Allen can see all the security improvements she would make if she had the budget.
“We have plexi on the counter downstairs for Covid but that won’t stop a person. It’s literally just clamped to the counters,” the county clerk and registrar said. For about $50,000, the office could secure the front, limiting access to upstairs offices, she estimated. Another county put bulletproof glass in their lobby years earlier, she knew, something officials there at one point considered removing, though not any more.
Elections offices didn’t used to think about security in this way, Allen said. Now they can’t afford not to.
Following Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Allen says the once low-profile job of non-partisan local election official has transformed in counties like hers. A culture of misinformation has sown doubt in the US election system and subjected officials from Nevada to Michigan to harassment and threats. The FBI has received more than 1,000 reports of threats against election workers in the past year alone.
In California, officials in small, rural and underresourced counties such as Shasta say they are encountering hostility and aggressive bullying from residents who believe there is widespread voter fraud – many are inundating local elections offices with public records requests as part of a relentless quest to try to prove their claims.
Residents in Shasta county have tried to intimidate election workers while acting as observers, crowding around Allen during a tense election night confrontation in June, and visiting voters’ homes while claiming to be a part of an “official taskforce”. In north-eastern California’s Nevada county, the registrar-elect had to take out a restraining order against residents who harassed her and pushed their way into her office, assaulting a staffer, she said.
“It’s really an unprecedented time,” said Kim Alexander, the president of the non-partisan California Voter Foundation, a non-profit organization that works on improving election processes. “A colleague recently referred to it as a sort of madness that’s taken hold.”
‘This is our Tiananmen Square’
On a Tuesday in September, speaker after speaker went before the Shasta county board of supervisors decrying the “election fraud” they believed – without evidence – is taking place. Dressed in red, white and blue, the residents described their effort as a David-and-Goliath-like battle.
“It’s called a citizen’s audit and we’ve been going out and collecting the evidence that shows there is fraud in our process,” one speaker said. “This is our Tiananmen Square. We’re going to stand in front of the tanks and say no more to the machines.”
The group of residents casting doubt over Shasta’s elections is small but highly visible, and speaks regularly at county board meetings. They have filed dozens of public records requests to Allen’s office, showed up in large numbers for election observation, and even visited the homes of certain voters while wearing gear labeled “official voter taskforce” – an act that Allen said may amount to voter intimidation.
Their opposition comes amid broader political upheaval in this rural northern county, stemming from anger among some residents over Trump’s loss and pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates imposed by California’s progressive government.
The anger coalesced into an anti-establishment movement, backed with unprecedented outside funding from a Connecticut millionaire and supported by the area’s militia groups, that led to the recall of a longtime county supervisor in February. Behavior seen during that election prompted Allen’s office to make security changes, including tracking everyone who enters the facility.
During the primaries in June, when the school superintendent, district attorney and sheriff were on the ballot, a crowd of observers tried to intimidate county staff, Allen said, and someone installed a trail camera outside the office, seemingly intending to monitor election workers. The sheriff stationed deputies outside the office. After four of the candidates backed by the anti-establishment group lost outright – Allen beat her opponent and was re-elected to her fifth-term – the candidates requested a hand recount.
The county’s use of Dominion voting machines, which Trump supporters have maligned as part of a false conspiracy theory that the company played a role in swinging the 2020 election for Biden, has drawn particular concern from residents who believe in widespread election fraud. Some of them have attempted to share content with Allen, such as 2000 Mules, a debunked documentary that has promoted false claims about voter fraud.
One high-profile figure in the election denial movement recently held a $20 event at a church in the area. The grandstanding from people making money from spreading debunked narratives around elections is particularly frustrating for Allen.
If there are problems around elections, she said, she would rely on the actual experts she knows who have worked in the field for decades and share information for free: “I guarantee you, they’re not gonna charge people 20 bucks a head at a church in Redding, California, to tell the story. That’s making you a dollar, that’s not trying to make anything better.”
Allen’s office has seen aggressive behavior and bullying, she said, but no threats yet. Given the threats elections officials across the US are facing, she suspects it’s only a matter of time.
“This is not what anybody signed up for,” she said. “I’ve had people tell me I should have private security. It’s not right. But it’s the world we live in right now.”
‘Just another form of harassment’
About 150 miles away in the Sierra Nevada foothills in eastern California, Natalie Adona said her office, too, was experiencing the same challenges: “If it’s happening in Shasta, chances are it’s also happening here. The loudest would-be disruptors of elections share information between our counties.”
Political tensions in Nevada county, which is home to about 100,000 people in historic towns and settlements that were at the center of California’s Gold Rush, have been rising since after the 2020 election, said Adona, the assistant county clerk recorder.
Earlier this year a group of residents attempted an aggressive and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to recall the entire board of supervisors, accusing them of enabling “crimes against humanity” for supporting Covid safety measures.
While running for her position this spring, Adona said she and her office were subjected to a months-long public harassment campaign, as well as racist language in an election mailer that featured a darkened photo of her and efforts to disqualify her over false claims that she failed to pay filing fees. After Adona won by nearly 70%, opponents requested a recount.
“I considered it to be just another form of harassment and I think one of the other purposes was to try to get at other documents that aren’t normally [obtainable] in the regular observation process,” she said.
At the same time, her office has received a flurry of public records requests in recent months that appear to be copy-and-pasted, Adona said: “What we’re today is either deliberate attempts to put a kink in elections process or just sort of an inundation of requests that really reflect how little the requestor knows about elections.”
Adona has also received one threat, she said, which was not actionable by law enforcement.
“It’s certainly not at the level of Georgia or Wisconsin. I do feel fortunate but at the same time a lot of it is unnerving,” she said.
The Nevada county office has increased its budget for security at its headquarters and is working more closely with law enforcement.
“I have the best job in the world. I get to serve voters, I get to serve the public but over the last few years election administration has become harder,” she said. “It’s raised a lot of questions for my team about how we keep in-person election workers safe, how do we keep our staff safe and at the same time offer the same levels of transparency in elections the public deserves.”
‘We haven’t had a break in about five years’
Across the US the climate has grown so tense that one in five election workers has said they are unlikely to remain in their positions through the next presidential election, according to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice. About one in six say they have been personally threatened.
Throughout California, small but vocal groups inspired by uninformed or malevolent actors, have been led to believe false narratives about how the state conducts elections, Alexander, of the California Voter Foundation, said, prompting the organization to make the safety of election workers increasingly a focus.
The group, along with the Brennan Center, recently sponsored legislation signed into law by the California governor that allows workers to keep their home addresses confidential.
“I never imagined when I started working on elections security almost 30 years ago that it would include the physical security of people who run our elections,” Alexander said.
But things have changed rapidly, she said. Her organization is trying to support election officials by providing de-escalation training and other resources to their offices. More help is needed, and has been for a long time.
“The chronic underfunding of election administration in the US is one of the conditions that led to the vulnerability of our election workers. If the offices weren’t understaffed and underresourced in the first place they would have more security,” she said.
California election offices were already challenged by back-to-back elections for the last few years, including 2021’s recall election of the governor. Months after that, Shasta county had its local recall election.
“We haven’t had a break in about five years,” said Allen, who is also on the board of directors for the California Voter Foundation. “None of my staff has been able to really disconnect – not for any length of time. I can’t even go to the top of Mount Lassen, where I know no one can get a hold of me.”
In the past, demystifying the election process with guided tours of the office and a walk-through of their procedures helped allay people’s fears, Allen said. This year, the office is attempting to fight against the tide of misinformation and disinformation with a steady trickle of good information publicized by her office through social media and webinars, she said, attempting to reach the voters they can. The county recently hired someone to work on voter education and outreach.
But as misinformation proliferates, there’s a growing contingency of people who won’t believe any message coming out of the office, she said.
“I don’t know how to dissuade people from a belief that they have swallowed wholesale like it’s a religion,” she said. “We’ll still try.”
Still, Allen remains hopeful things will get better. On a table in her office is a stack of thank you cards from residents expressing gratitude for her office’s work. She won re-election by a massive margin.
“In June, all the folks who believe in some of this bad information about election fraud and elections being stolen – six of those folks ran for office in June’s election – and none of them won. Not one of them,” she said. “To me, that’s the story: the voters of Shasta county saw through that.”
As far as the national challenges for election workers, “this too shall pass,” Allen said.
“I do think it’s going to get worse before it gets better – but it will get better,” she said.
