Local police across America prep for election threats and violence

PHOENIX — As Election Day nears, police chiefs and sheriffs around the country are bracing themselves for violent threats against election workers, turmoil at voting sites and intimidation of voters.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, multiple emergency hubs will be running on Nov. 5. In Georgia, all new police officers are now required to study election law. In Omaha, Nebraska, the sheriff has even inspected ballot-counting machines in response to residents’ concerns. And across the nation, local law enforcement officials have been huddling with election officials to game out how they will handle bomb threats, SWAT hoaxes and white powdery substances if they materialize on Election Day.

It all points to what many law enforcement officials and election experts see as a dire new normal: elections in America marred by threats, mischief and violence.

“It is a new reality,” said Meghan Noland, the executive director of the Major County Sheriffs Association. “What we preach is that, while we hope that Election Day is peaceful and calm and safe for everyone, hope is not a strategy; preparation is.”

Everything changed four years ago, these officials and experts say. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump claimed that Democrats would steal the presidency from him. Then, as votes were counted and his loss to Joe Biden became undeniable, he and his lawyers spread lies and conspiracy theories about election administration and poll workers. His supporters disrupted vote counting in Detroit, terrorized Georgia election workers and, on Jan. 6, 2021, infiltrated and ransacked the Capitol.

Now, as Trump once again promotes falsehoods about election fraud and denigrates election officials, law enforcement officers worry that the floodgates to violence are open.

With less than a week until Election Day, attacks on the mechanisms of democracy have begun. In recent days, ballots were damaged by suspected arson incidents at mailboxes or dropboxes in Arizona, Massachusetts, Washington and Oregon.

Justin Smith, the retired sheriff of Larimer County, Colorado, compared the atmosphere of election threats — and the pressure on law enforcement to adapt — to the epidemic of school shootings over the past 25 years.

“I think 2020 was to elections what 1999 and Columbine probably was to school safety planning,” Smith said.

In Arizona, a hotbed of unrest

No state has faced more election-related tumult over the past four years than Arizona. Just ask the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

Fontes testified at a court hearing this week that he almost always wears a bulletproof vest when he’s out in public. The striking disclosure is a sign of how much things have changed in the historically red state that has recently turned purple.

In 2020, Biden won the state by about 10,000 votes. Trump refused to accept his loss, accusing authorities in Maricopa County — which includes Phoenix and is by far the state’s largest county — of conspiring to steal the election.

Trump supporters from around the country poured into Arizona to protest. They also threatened local election officials. Protesters gathered outside one election official’s home while his three children were inside, according to The Guardian. And Arizona’s then-House Speaker, a Republican named Rusty Bowers, told Congress that after he refused to help Trump overturn the election results, Trump supporters gathered outside his home regularly, blaring loudspeakers and accusing him of pedophilia.

As the 2022 midterms neared, tension persisted. Election workers in Maricopa County faced sustained violent threats in the months before the midterms, according to a Reuters investigation. People photographed officials as they arrived at work, and one person said they would all “be executed.”

The threats were so intense in 2022 that the Maricopa sheriff at the time, Paul Penzone, used fences, barricades, helicopters, drones and horses to secure vote-counting facilities.

“That pressure has given life to the normalization of civil unrest, or civil discourse at a level that is violent in nature,” Penzone said.

It’s also drawn the attention of federal authorities. In the Justice Department’s most recent update on election-threat cases, eight out of 20 prosecutions targeted people who threatened Arizona officials. Five of those cases involved threats to officials in Maricopa County.

Earlier this month, a man was arrested for shooting at a Democratic National Committee office in Phoenix. No one was hurt, but authorities recovered more than 120 guns and 250,000 rounds of ammunition.

As Election Day nears, Maricopa County is preparing for the worst. Authorities told POLITICO they will operate four emergency operations centers around the county, and the sheriff’s office has already consulted with the county’s top prosecutor on the threshold for bringing criminal charges against people who disrupt voting. In the 2022 midterms, it took at least 150 sheriff’s deputies to manage election security, the current sheriff, Russ Skinner, said. That’s six times as many officers as in the years before 2020. This year, he said, it will take even more. Some deputies may be deployed as plainclothes officers in the parking lots of voting sites.

“We don’t want to have to prepare like this,” Skinner said. “This is a public-facing process and, unfortunately, it’s had to become much more secure, much more planning around the actual event. It really shouldn’t be that way.”

Training for elections and the ‘right to be annoying’

Maricopa County is far from the only jurisdiction that is deploying increasingly large numbers of cops to protect election security. One challenge for police chiefs and sheriffs nationwide is training their officers in an unfamiliar and politically sensitive area.

Before 2020, it was largely unheard-of for beat cops or sheriffs’ deputies to study election law; instead, their legal training focused on bread-and-butter policing topics like how to read arrestees their Miranda rights and when they can search a suspect’s car. But as election threats have metastasized, more and more officers are receiving training on their states’ laws on voter intimidation and politicking near polling places.

Sometimes, state election laws are complex and officials have to balance First Amendment rights against their ability to run a smooth election without disruption. For instance, according to Chris Harvey, Georgia’s former state elections director, in the Peach State it’s legal for registered voters to waltz into a polling place, tell the site director they think the election is rigged, plop down in a lawn chair and take notes on everything they see. This occasionally happens in Georgia, he said.

“It’s annoying,” he added. “Sometimes you have a right to be annoying.”

The legalities become more complex if that person makes a scene or frightens other voters. But if police remove a disruptive person who hasn’t yet voted, they could face accusations of disenfranchisement. Just this week, after a Trump supporter was arrested at a Pennsylvania polling site and cited for disorderly conduct, the Trump campaign accused authorities of voter suppression.

Before 2020 in Georgia, the average police officer wouldn’t have had any training on how to handle episodes like these — and probably wouldn’t have needed it.

But the increasing frequency of such episodes has reached a tipping point. Harvey, now the deputy director of the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, oversaw the roll-out of a new requirement for people training to be police officers in the state: Starting in January, they will all spend at least an hour studying election law. Georgia is the first state in the country with this requirement.

Some of that training will help officers learn when to take a light hand. For instance, it’s illegal to engage in political activity within 75 feet of any U.S. polling site. So if someone walks into a polling station with a hat emblazoned with a candidate’s name, they are technically committing a crime by advocating for that candidate. But that doesn’t mean officers should pounce.

“If somebody comes in wearing the candidate’s hat on Election Day, we don’t need the cop confronting them, arresting them, taking them to jail,” he said.

Instead, many election officials are preparing for such situations by studying deescalation techniques — the kind of training that, nationally, has been embraced by police departments.

In Green Bay, Wisconsin, meanwhile, Chief Chris Davis had officers start training on election law after the 2022 midterms. A state law that lets voters accuse each other of lawbreaking at polling sites has been a particular focus.

“If people started doing this on a large scale, that’s going to upset people, normally,” he said. “And if I sent a police officer to a polling place who has no idea what this thing is that people are arguing about, that doesn’t help.”

Harassment and attrition in North Carolina

Another concerning trend is that, after the turmoil of 2020, election workers have left their jobs in droves. That means in some swing states, the highly scrutinized 2024 election is being supervised by a less experienced crop of local officials.

Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of North Carolina’s State Board of Elections, said the attrition was a direct result of threats and harassment.

“They would talk about the environment having changed and they just didn’t have it in them to keep making the sacrifices that it takes to be an election official,” Bell said. One departing election director told her, “I’ve got to go live my life.”

One-third of North Carolina’s counties have elections directors supervising a presidential election for the first time this fall, she said.

Bell understands the departing workers’ concerns: She herself faced unnerving attention in 2020. During the certification of North Carolina’s results — which Trump won — a few dozen protesters marched outside the election board’s office for several days. One held a sign that read, “What is Karen Brinson Bell doing with our ballots?”

“We don’t count ballots at the state board — it’s done at the local [level],” she said. “So they were in the wrong place to question that. They were questioning the wrong person.”

Protesters also projected pictures of board members’ faces onto the walls of the building where they worked — perfectly legal, First Amendment-protected activity that, nonetheless, was intensely discomfiting.

Bell has worked in North Carolina on elections since 2006; 2020 was the first time she was aware of protesters gathering outside an election facility there. But it wasn’t the last.

In 2022, a small group of election deniers appeared at a county election office and demanded access to restricted election materials, including voting equipment. Election workers refused, and police had to intervene. When that happened, Bell started working much more closely with law enforcement. She began meeting with state police chiefs and sheriffs, urging them to take the threats seriously.

Election officials and police have held tabletop exercises, gaming out how they would work together if chaos erupts. Police in North Carolina cannot legally be stationed at polling places, but election officials can call them for help. So what’s the threshold for seeking that help? It’s a topic they’ve chewed on together.

Bell and her team also developed a course on elections for police and deputies. It became available this year as an online elective.

Protection versus intimidation

The increased involvement of law enforcement in elections raises an additional thorny issue: the potential for police presence itself to cause alarm.

North Carolina isn’t the only state where police can’t post up outside polling places unless there’s a threat; New Jersey has a similar restriction. The laws respond to the history of police officers’ role in voter intimidation — especially intimidation of Black voters during the Jim Crow era. They also reflect concerns that voters who see police at a polling place might wrongly assume something dangerous happened there and avoid voting altogether.

But some other states, including Massachusetts, require police presence at polling places. Regardless of these divergent state laws, most of the police chiefs and sheriffs who spoke with POLITICO acknowledged the importance of being clear-eyed about the fine line between protection and intimidation.

Atiba Ellis, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, said police need to carefully strike the balance of protecting voters and election workers without creating the impression that they are hunting for perpetrators of voter fraud. Caution is especially important in jurisdictions where community-police relations are tense.

“Certainly in communities of color that have been in the past the targets of election integrity-type law enforcement efforts by police, the voters in those communities are mindful of that history,” he said. “So I think police would need to walk a very careful line, and need to focus on the unauthorized disruptive efforts of outsiders, as opposed to being mistaken for being there for purposes of policing voters who are legitimately there.”

Tabletop exercises and pocket guides

A variety of national groups are working to help train law enforcement and build relationships between police and election officials.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a component of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for election security, trains officials around the country. It provides tabletop exercises on scenarios including a protest that turns violent, an active shooter at a polling place or even a covert extremist discovered in an election office.

Outside government, a variety of groups are also working on the issue. The Committee for Safe and Secure Elections has created pocket guides for police in all 50 states summarizing election laws. The Georgia booklet, for instance, notes that poll-watchers cannot record video, and that people cannot carry guns within 150 feet of a polling place.

Justin Smith, the former Colorado sheriff, worked on the project and has been leading tabletop exercises. One disturbing trend he’s noticed: The increase of “swatting” hoaxes — where bad actors call the police anonymously and claim there’s a life-threatening emergency at a victim’s house, in hopes that a SWAT team will break down their door and terrify them. Swatting has become a widespread problem for members of Congress and other public officials — and authorities are worried that voting sites will be easy targets for swatting attacks.

“We would be sticking our heads in the sand to not recognize that has potential,” Smith said.

This summer, FBI officials sent materials to thousands of election workers explaining how to reduce their risk of being swatted and what to do if it happens, according to a person with knowledge of the communication who was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. Reached for comment on the warning, a bureau spokesperson said the FBI urges people to report public safety threats.

Diverse threats, diverse agencies

Officials are grappling with serious election-related threats beyond those that could end in physical violence.

John Cohen, an executive director at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, warns local authorities to prepare for both cyber and physical threats. His group has held scores of briefings with law enforcement and election officials to help them prepare for everything from cyberattacks, bomb threats, envelopes containing white powder and even attacks on candidates running for office.

And in a stark sign of both public anxiety over elections and the expanded role of law enforcement, the sheriff in Douglas County, Nebraska, even became involved in supervising election machines. Sheriff Aaron Hanson met with his local election commissioner and a representative from the Nebraska secretary of state’s office to look at ballot-counting machines after residents raised concerns about how the machines work, he said. The sheriff and another top official recommended an additional security measure — a seal to show if someone has accessed the machines — which he said the local commissioner will implement.

Despite the participation of national training groups, responding to such a diverse array of concerns is up to local officials in a country with thousands of election jurisdictions and 18,000 local law enforcement agencies. Those agencies range from big-city police departments that have their own intelligence offices all the way down to rural sheriffs’ offices that task a few dozen deputies with law enforcement responsibilities that cover thousands of square miles.

Smith, who has worked with the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections to train law enforcement and election officials in more than 30 states since the midterms, says there is more work to be done. He said that, in trainings, he asks police and sheriffs how many have a school safety plan.

“Every hand in the room goes up,” he said. “‘Cool, that’s great. How many of you exercise that annually?’ Again, every hand will go up. Then I’ll throw out the question, ‘How many of you have an election safety plan?’ A year ago it was pretty spotty. ‘How many of you have practiced your election plan?’ It’s very unusual to have a hand go up. ‘Ok. So let’s think about it that way. It has the potential. We now know. We’ve seen this happen. It’s possible. So let’s put some planning together.’”