Why are election officials being threatened, and what do surveys show?

Election officials, the county clerks and city staff who register voters, run polling places and count ballots, have been targeted by threats in recent years, and surveys give a sense of how widespread it is. In the Brennan Center's 2026 survey of US local election officials, 32 percent said they had been threatened, harassed or abused, compared with 38 percent in 2025. In the US, the examples include Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea' Moss, who were driven from their home by death threats after Rudy Giuliani accused them of manipulating vote tallies. They later won a defamation judgment against him.

The threats take many forms. Threatening letters, some containing fentanyl, were mailed to elections offices in at least five states in November 2023, some with messages such as "End elections now." Between September 2023 and 2024, election offices received white powder in envelopes, and one office in Ohio had its window shot.

Turnover is high too, though not only because of threats. A Bipartisan Policy Center and UCLA study found a four-year turnover rate of 39% for election officials in 2022, up from 28% in 2004, and the Center's Rachel Orey called it a long-term issue rooted in chronic challenges such as low pay and fast-changing laws. Some officials have reported varying their routes to avoid being followed, training in de-escalation and upgrading home security, and some poll workers were given protections such as electronic screening of poll watchers, panic buttons and bulletproof glass.

Support has come from across party lines. In 2021, a Democratic and a Republican election lawyer launched the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which had more than 6,000 attorneys in 47 states as of June 2024. Violence around elections is not only an American story: an Amnesty International survey found at least one case of political violence every two days in the three months before Brazil's 2 October 2022 first round.