A Colorado election official believes that the threats of violence that have bubbled up in the weeks leading up to the midterms has given him no other choice but to don a bulletproof vest.
“I wear one pretty much every single day,” said Josh Zygielbaum, the County Clerk and Recorder in Adams County, Colorado, in an interview with Terry Moran which aired on ABC News on Sunday night.
The Colorado election worker, who is on the ballot for his own re-election as County Clerk, explained during the Sunday night episode of The Week how he’d been taking precautionary measures to proof the office for weeks. Panic buttons, for instance, are now installed under each desk in the County Clerk’s office.
“Really trying to harden the office as a target as much as we could,” the Democratic County Clerk explained to the ABC journalist, while providing a tour of the facilities and the security measures that have been put in place to protect him and his poll workers.
Mr Zygielbaum acknowledged that part of what prompted these security measures were incidents in the past that have made him feel unsafe.
“I have had some incidents in the past where people have followed me back to my neighbourhood,” he said. After flagging these concerns to the local sheriff, he “recommended that I wear a ballistic vest whenever I feel necessary.”
Now, that amounts to just about every day, Mr Zygielbaum admitted.
While Mr Zygielbaum’s precautions may seem to the unobservant eye as overzealous, for a person in his public position it seems, unfortunately, proportionate.
Following former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that widespread voter fraud cost him his re-election in 2020, there has been a wave of threats launched against election workers, which later prompted the Justice Department to set up a task force in the summer of 2021.
That task force, as of July 2022, had already reviewed more than 1,000 threatening and harassing messages, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr told the Senate Judiciary Committee last summer.
And those threats of violence against local poll workers have only seemed to become more intensified in the waning weeks of the midterm campaign season.
“Election workers have expressed on a regular basis their concerns. They’ve seen what the potential for violence is across our nation. And now they’ve seen just a few folks act in a manner that is intimidating or bullying on the ground here in Arizona,” said Paul Penzone, sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, in an interview with Politico.
In recent weeks, it’s been reported by the secretary of state that there have been 18 instances of “camo clad men” and vigilante “watchers” hiding in bushes to surveil ballot boxes in what authorities have characterised as a case of voter intimidation.
“People are fearful because they’re not sure what to expect,” said Mr Penzone.
In other areas of the US, where pro-Trump supporters blasted lies about election tampering after the results of the 2020 election had been read, the increasing anxiety for poll workers has been tamping up for weeks.
The Detroit Free Press reported about a group called the America Project in Michigan, who provide training to “volunteers” to monitor ballot boxes via a camera set up outside and to encourage them to bring along guns in case they have a brush with a supposed criminal.
Fears of potential violence have also intensified in recent weeks in light of the politically motivated attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, who had his skull fractured last month by a hammer-wielding intruder beset on kidnapping the Democratic leader after he broke into the couple’s San Francisco home.
For his part, Mr Zygielbaum thinks that the fact that he feels he must don body armour daily in the leadup to a democratic election speaks volumes about the state of the country’s political atmosphere.
“It says that you know, that our democracy isn’t as probably healthy as it should be right now,” he told ABC reporter Mr Moran.
The Justice Department has previously weighed in on lawsuits against one of the groups monitoring ballot boxes in Arizona after the group claimed that it was protected by the First Amendment and were simply attending to the boxes to prevent so-called voter fraud.
