Ruby Freeman was forced to sell her home and live out of her car. Her church members were afraid to be around her. Her daughter Shaye Moss lost friends and relationships. She cries all the time. She’s rarely alone. When she’s not, she’s nauseous from fear that someone is watching and waiting to kill her. Most days she prays to God that she doesn’t wake up.
Racist and threatening abuse arrives in a barrage of social media messages and phone calls. People have threatened to hang them and fantasized about snapping their necks. A group of men barged into a family home to try to arrest them.
Life for two Black former election workers from Georgia turned completely upside down in the volatile aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, after Rudy Giuliani’s lies about the work they did handling ballots came out of Donald Trump’s mouth and poured gasoline on a fire of violent and racist conspiracy theories that are still fuelling his campaign.
This week, in a federal courthouse in Washington DC, Mr Giuliani heard directly from both women, in person, for the first time. A jury decided he owes them a total of $148m for defaming them.
Those women are not alone, and those threats haven’t gone away. Mr Giuliani is merely the highest profile figure yet facing accountability for them.
Proponents of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from or rigged against Mr Trump cast poll workers and Americans who keep our elections running as villains in a conspiracy against them.
Those lies not only fed mob violence on January 6, they are also animating Republican attempts to rewrite the rules of election administration and empower GOP officials to overturn results. And they are driving election workers out of their jobs, feeding a crisis for democracy to be primed for abuse by antidemocratic forces.
A third of local election officials nationwide have faced threats, intimidation or abuse, according to an April survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. More than half are concerned for the safety of their colleagues, while roughly 30 per cent reported abuse, harassment or threats because of their job.
More than 160 chief election officials in western US states quit their jobs after the 2020 election, according to democracy advocacy group Issue One.
Unlike Republicans’ demand for “election integrity” while waving a noxious spectre of “voter fraud” plaguing elections, the targeted lies against election workers frame them specifically as the masterminds in their made-up crimes. “What Trump set loose, many subsidiary politicians have rushed in to exploit,” according to the Brennan Center.
Over the last three years, state lawmakers have introduced more than 600 proposals that threaten to upend the nation’s elections – legislative threats that have largely failed to pass but have kept conspiracy theories alive in statehouses across the country.
Georgia Republicans passed a restrictive voting law months after the 2020 election, a bill that one of the state’s top GOP officials said began to circulate “when Rudy Giuliani showed up in a couple of committee rooms and spent hours spreading misinformation and sowing doubt across, you know, hours of testimony.”
Nine states have also withdrawn from a national organization to keep voter rolls up to date, after Mr Trump falsely claimed it “pumps the rolls” with Democratic voters and called on his allies to pull out.
The former president even explicitly told his supporters this month to “go into” cities with large Black populations and “watch” how ballots are counted, weaponising doubt about the electoral process that Mr Trump himself created.
Mr Giuliani has a history of his own explicit voter suppression. He admitted earlier this year that he relied on a “dirty trick” in the early 1990s to dissuade Latino voters from showing up to the polls by handing out cards that said, “If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because INS is picking up illegals.”
The former president’s sham attempts to throw out ballots and overturn election results in states that he lost in 2020 centred on a handful of cities and counties with large populations of Black and Latino voters – like Atlanta.
After Mr Giuliani lied about Ms Freeman and Ms Moss bringing suitcases of ballots into an Atlanta vote counting centre, and then passing around a USB drive loaded with votes, then-President Trump called up Georgia’s top elections official and mentioned Ms Freeman’s name 18 times. He falsely claimed that the women pulled out “what looked to be suitcases or trunks” that were “stuffed with votes” with a “minimum” of “18,000 ballots, all for Biden.”
He called Ms Freeman “a professional vote scammer.”
“He had no clue what he was talking about,” Ms Freeman told the jury in Mr Giuliani’s trial. “He was just trying to put a name to somebody stealing ballots, which was totally a lie.”
