Republicans and Democrats reconnect with their poll workers and election judges every two years here to ask if they are willing to officiate elections for another two. Until recently, it has been a thankless job for which workers receive, essentially, a stipend. They don’t do it for the money. They do it to give back to their communities. Most won’t be pried out of the jobs until age and illness sap their stamina for working a 14-hour Election Day. Others working in public jobs feel the same.
Zack Beauchamp elaborates at Vox:
Yet over the course of the past year and a half, the Americans who do this critical work — mostly anonymous individuals motivated by a sense of civic duty — have been subject to a wave of violent threats. Consider the following examples:
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- In Vermont, a man menaced a group of election officials, warning them that “your days are fucking numbered.”
- In Missouri, a public health official was “physically assaulted, called racist slurs, and surrounded by an angry mob.”
- In Oregon, a school board member was told that a neighbor was out looking for him — and threatening to kill him.
These are not one-off incidents. Surveys have found that 17 percent of America’s local election officials and nearly 12 percent of its public health workforce have been threatened due to their jobs during the 2020 election cycle and Covid-19 pandemic. While none of the threats against public servants appear to have led to deadly violence yet, the volume has gotten severe enough that the Justice Department created two separate initiatives to help combat threats against election administrators and education workers (board members, teachers, administrators, and other school staff).
“It’s not even accurate to say [threatening election workers] was rare prior to 2020. It was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “This is beyond anything that we’ve ever seen.”
The new wave of threats is cresting on one side of the partisan divide. Generally, the individuals responsible seem to believe former President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims about the 2020 election, oppose Covid-19 vaccines and masks, and claim schools are indoctrinating their kids with “critical race theory.”
The open hostility and threats will make others think twice before taking jobs that make our communities work. And maybe that’s the goal. The reports are not merely anecdotal. People “on the receiving end are genuinely frightened,” Beauchamp reports:
Start with election workers: For the past several months, Reuters reporters Linda So and Jason Szep have interviewed dozens of election administration officials across the country, compiled a database of more than 800 threats against them, and even unmasked some of the individuals responsible for the harassment. Their conclusion is unequivocal: The spate of threats is real, and a direct outgrowth of Trump’s campaign to undermine the 2020 election.
And health care workers. And school board members. The reasons are familiar by now: Donald Trump, social media, disinformation.
In this narrative, government officials are no longer people merely implementing policies you disagree with — they are agents of darkness, existential threats to your freedom and to your families. And when people start thinking that, they start thinking about sending death threats.
This kind of rhetoric is best understood as an outgrowth of “pernicious polarization”: a phenomenon where “a society is split into mutually distrustful ‘Us vs. Them’ camps,” write Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, the political scientists who coined the term.
Bookmark that term for when and if it takes off. But more than that, the wave of threats, collectively, is a perhaps leaderless attempt to sabotage democracy if not public health as well. Just as Republicans assert that government doesn’t work, then get elected to prove it, the permanently aggrieved are driving civic-minded neighbors from the jobs that allow local governments to serve everyone, thus reinforcing what the belligerents already believe.
Redefining every sphere of life into an us-versus-them competition with existential stakes turns the cogs of democracy — the nonpartisan bureaucrats and local elected officials who administer key functions of the state — into partisan targets.
The result could well be the increasing decay of the American state’s ability to perform its basic functions. Running free and fair elections, protecting public health, educating children: These are essential functions of any democratic government. But our polarization crisis, accelerated by Trump and his allies, is making those tasks harder and harder to carry out.
They say the system is broken. But they’re the ones breaking it.