On a quiet day, home alone with the windows open at her Michigan home, Tina Barton thought she heard a voice saying: “Hello.”
Her heart started beating quickly, as she believed someone uninvited might be outside her rural house. She slammed the windows shut. She called her husband and had him check the security cameras. He saw no one.
She was in an “absolute panic”. When she had been an elections clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, in 2020, Barton had faced death threats and harassment for doing her job. One man had threatened to “fucking kill her”. For quite some time, she hadn’t known who the threatening man was. He could have been anyone. He could have been a person who’d show up to her house one day.
The incident at her house came a year after she’d left her job, but two years before the man would be identified and charged. That day, her daughter eventually arrived home, telling Barton she’d had a scare in the garage. The noise wasn’t anyone upset at a local elections official – it was the neighbor’s barn cat, stuck in the garage, bellowing, sounding like a human voice.
“We laugh about it now,” Barton said. “But I realized in that moment that something was going on in my brain that was not normal for me.”
Barton, now a senior elections expert at the Elections Group, tells this story to rooms of elections officials, many of whom have experienced the same harassment and threats she did when Donald Trump and his allies led a campaign to question and overturn the results of the 2020 election. It’s part of a resilience training she hosts at elections conferences around the country, as well as virtually, to confront the ongoing harassment public servants face.
The election workers in the audience could also be dealing with hypervigilance, fear and post-traumatic stress from their work. They may feel isolated or like they’re overreacting. Barton’s story, she said, lets them know they’re not alone.
“In order for them to feel that they can be weak and vulnerable and talk about those things and open up about them, I have to first display that to them,” she said.
Election threats, often based on misinformation or distortions of election processes, didn’t end in 2020. They’re now an everyday problem for election officials in the US, bringing with them the potential to turn into violence. Even without a physical manifestation, they cause stress, worry and chaos to elections offices and the people who work in them.
These harassing and threatening messages are more likely to target women and people of color, according to Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative, which studies political violence. They’re more common in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. Most do not result in criminal charges, though a justice department unit focused on election threats has charged more than a dozen people since 2021.
The problem is at a “consistently high baseline”, surveys of elections officials from CivicPulse found. In any given quarter, “nearly half of all officials have been insulted, a third have been harassed, and nearly one in five threatened”. Threats turning physical, while rare, cast worry and fear over these officials – one in five female officials “worry about attacks on them or their family”, CivicPulse says.
A wave of election officials have quit their jobs, often leaving less experienced people in charge of voting. Nationwide data on the departures isn’t available, but a study of 11 states in the US west by Issue One showed that more than 160 chief local election officials had left their roles since the 2020 election, leaving half of the 76 million Americans living in those states with a new top election official.
For those who have stayed, the threats aren’t going away or getting better. Elections officials are looking for a way to commiserate and find ways to manage the ongoing harassment in their daily work lives.
Bill Gates, a Maricopa county official in Arizona who was the target of harassment by fellow Republicans for years, shared in a Washington Post story that he sought therapy and dealt with post-traumatic stress in the aftermath. Maricopa county election workers have dealt with ongoing harassment since 2020.
Groups that focus on election issues have added resources for mental wellness. The Carter Center created a wellbeing resource guide for elections officials. “I think what’s especially helpful is basically just being able to talk to people about it,” said David Carroll, the director of the center’s democracy program.
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After the cat wakeup call in 2021, Barton said she called Harold Love, a longtime friend and retired Michigan state police captain who now works as a counselor. He told her she was having a “very normal response to an abnormal situation”.
“A lot of things are based on fear – the fear that something is going to happen, the fear that a threat that I receive is going to be carried out. And if you’ve heard some of the horrific things that some of them have been subjected to, just the thought of someone carrying that out, it may put a person in a state of hypervigilance,” said Love, who helped Barton with resources for the training. “In other words, every noise makes you jumpy.”
She tells the elections officials in the resilience trainings the same thing: you’re not abnormal. You’re not alone. The fear and stress you’re feeling make sense for the circumstances you’re experiencing.
“Sometimes I have to just repeat his statement to me when I feel anxious, this is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation,” she said. “It’s abnormal to have someone say they want to slice your throat in public. It’s abnormal for someone to say they want to kill you. Those things are abnormal. I’m not abnormal.”
An injury doesn’t need to be physical to have a lasting effect, Love said. The body tries to protect itself by being overly vigilant and withdrawing from activities that could cause anxiety or worry. There’s also a tendency for people to downplay the way threats affect them or not talk about them, but “trauma is trauma”, Love said.
The sessions help officials reflect on the weight they’ve been carrying for years, as they’ve put their heads down to do the important work of elections despite the noise. They might not be aware of the ways harassment affects their daily lives. They may have lost sight of why they’re still doing this job. Barton likens it to carrying around her granddaughter on any given day: her weight doesn’t change, but over time, it becomes more difficult to carry.
“It’s become backbreaking. It’s become exhausting. It’s making you fatigued in lots of areas. And so just kind of reminding them of, this is why you’re feeling that, this is why you are in this place. And it’s OK to put the weight down,” she said.
The trainings detail what stress, trauma and burnout can look like. She talks about ways to manage them: through changing your mindset, taking a break, deep breathing, preparing for stressful times in advance, talking with others, finding an accountability partner, going to therapy.
The mental wellness tools can help the individuals manage the daily stresses of their increasingly difficult job, but they’re working against a systemic problem that’s much harder to solve – and often exacerbated by political leaders who throw more vitriol their way.
Threatening and harassing messages often don’t lead to criminal charges because prosecutors weigh whether they’ll be able to convict someone against free speech rights. Most messages aren’t actionable, even if they seem to a layperson to clearly be calling for violence or death. Those leaving the messages are often anonymous, too, creating a fear that the threatening person could be anyone.
The Department of Justice created an election threats taskforce in 2021 and has so far charged 15 people, 11 of whom have been convicted. But some people who work in elections say the department hasn’t been aggressive enough, despite the attorney general, Merrick Garland, vowing to prosecute over election threats.
The Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told Rolling Stone this month that he’s frustrated by the department and Garland for “being far too cautious”.
“I have a lot of respect for the attorney general, but he is not being nearly aggressive enough on this threat, which is imperiling our democracy, and he and the department are not devoting nearly enough resources to it. This should be treated like the emergency that it is.”
Local officials have became a symbol for people upset with Trump’s loss who were searching for someone to blame and had their fears of a stolen election stoked by politicians and rightwing news outlets. The threats often don’t come from the community itself, but from people from another state who have read a post online.
When locals do weigh in, elections officials are more accessible to an enraged citizen than a congressman or senator or president. They can walk into a city hall or clerk’s counter and talk directly to someone they may know from around town and give them a piece of their mind. Barton helps election workers understand that these angry people don’t represent their whole community, just vocal detractors.
“Don’t lose sight of the work that you’re doing,” she tells them. “Give yourself grace and recognize that it’s a very small minority who’s been given a huge megaphone in this moment.”
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She knows what elections officials are going through because she was one. And she knows why they’ve stayed in it: they have a passion for service, they’re patriotic, they care about their communities.
Barton always brings the conversation back to the “why”, which many of them have lost in the chaos of this political moment. She asks the officials to write down three “whys” on a note card. It can range from needing a paycheck and insurance to caring deeply about public service. Those cards serve as a physical reminder for them to pull out during tough times and remember why they’re still at it.
She’s had attendees come up to her afterward and say they needed someone to open up this conversation, to feel like someone understood them. One election official came up to her at a conference and opened his wallet, taking out his notecard that he’d written at a previous session. “He said, ‘I take this with me everywhere I go,’” Barton said.
Barton can’t go back to who she was before her life was threatened; she’ll never be the same person again. Other election workers can’t either. But they can find ways to commiserate and cope and try to renew their passion, she said.
When they walk out of her resilience training, she wants them to feel like “they’ve been heard, they’ve been understood”.
