It could be a line out of “Why We Fight — 2022.”
“Trump supporters have waged a campaign of intimidation against the state and local officials who administer U.S. elections,” begins Reuters’ special graphic presentation, “Anatomy of a death threat.”
Reuters has documented more than 850 threatening and hostile messages aimed at election officials and staff related to the 2020 election. Virtually all expressed support for former President Donald Trump or echoed his debunked contention that the election was stolen. The messages spanned 30 jurisdictions in 16 states. They came via emails, voicemails, texts, letters and Internet posts.
Most messages, where gender could be determined, were from men. About 10 authors accounted for a fifth of the messages collected in this non-statistically representative sample.
Some are protected speech. Others, not so much.
There are more. Many more.
About 110 of the 850 messages Reuters collected appear to meet what law professors and attorneys say is the federal threshold for prosecution. That would make them so-called true threats, generally defined as those intended to put a person in fear of death or bodily harm or to inflict severe emotional distress. In many other messages, harassers call for violence without threatening to act themselves. Arrests for threatening election workers have been rare, even in cases of true threats.
Arrests are more numerous in the case of threats against federal officials, Reuters adds. The FBI has resources for tracking anonymous threats that state and local police departments lack.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced a task force to investigate and bring charges against people who threaten election workers in June after Reuters revealed the extent of the trend. So far, the task force has made no arrests. A Justice spokesperson said the department is committed to assessing reported threats of violence against election workers and officials, “and when a matter does rise to the level of a criminal threat, vigorously investigating the matter with all our criminal tools and aggressively prosecuting the matter where appropriate.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told Reuters that it, too, is committed to pursuing any criminal, election-related threats.
Amid limited response from law enforcement, threats against election workers persist long after the contested 2020 election.
Quotations from the collected threats make up the rest of the Reuters presentation. You would not want to be on the receiving end.
During my last visit to our local board of elections, admittance was on demand once the single staff member in the office could size me up though the glass door. (She knew me.)
“When did they start putting a thousand days in a month?” one volunteer asked. “I’ve never seen an election like this,” is another frequent comment. Everybody wishes this election was over, I wrote in October 2016.
The New Year promises to be another trying one. Look at the 2012 video clip above. It’s not as if no one could have seen the right-wing freakout building to this.