Active Shooter Trainings, Poll-Worker Shortages: How Trump’s Lies Forever Changed Elections

Scott McDonell has served a decade now as the top election official in Dane County, Wisconsin, home to the state’s capital city, Madison. For most of those years, he and his colleagues have toiled in relative anonymity, attending to the quiet administrative work of democracy.

Not this cycle.

Since Donald Trump began pushing lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him, McDonell and officials like him have found themselves conscripted into the front lines of democracy—subjected to dangerous threats, and navigating a new reality of active shooter trainings and plexiglass barriers in the office, just in case a conspiracy theory spirals out of control. “It is weird,” McDonell tells me. “It’s not a good sign for our democracy if I’m worried about bomb threats or an attack on my office.”

Concerns about intimidation and potential violence have mounted as Election Day nears. The United States government warned in a joint intelligence bulletin last month that there was a “heightened threat” to election workers and others from domestic violent extremism. “We assess some [domestic violent extremists] motivated by election-related grievances would likely view election-related infrastructure, personnel, and voters involved in the election process as attractive targets,” the bulletin read. In a speech the week before Election Day, President Joe Biden said right-wing radicalism had brought the country to an “inflection point.” But those threats don’t only imperil election workers, particularly in swing states essential to Biden’s 2020 victory. The intimidation has also put the election process itself in jeopardy.

“A lot of us thought when we sat on the inaugural stage two weeks after the insurrection…that all this was behind us,” says Senator Amy Klobuchar. “What they didn’t accomplish with bayonets and bear spray, they are clearly going to try to do with voter suppression and threats and the like.” The Minnesota Democrat introduced the Election Worker Protection Act earlier this fall with Illinois senator Dick Durbin. The bill—cosponsored by 17 colleagues, all members of the Democratic caucus—would provide states with resources to recruit and protect election workers. It has been sitting in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which Klobuchar chairs, since September.

The MAGA harassment began in 2020, when Trump and his allies mounted a relentless, multipronged crusade to overturn the results of an election based on conspiracy theories and false claims of widespread voter fraud. Mobs of Trump supporters rallied outside ballot-processing centers in swing states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan, where armed protesters also gathered outside the home of Democratic secretary of state Jocelyn Benson as she hung up Christmas decorations with her young son. They threatened lower-level election workers too, prompting a rebuke even from some Republican officials, including Georgia voting-system-implementation manager Gabriel Sterling, who cautioned that “someone is going to get hurt” if Trump didn’t put a stop to the lies and conspiracy theories. The Georgia Republican’s December 2020 warning bore out a month later, when armed Trump supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to prevent the election certification.

Those threats have not only continued in the two years since the insurrection, but in some ways seem to have intensified. According to a Brennan Center poll earlier this year, one in six election workers report receiving threats because of their job, and more than three quarters say the situation has gotten worse in recent years. As of August, over 1,000 instances of “hostile or harassing” contacts against election workers have been reported to the Election Threats Task Force established by the Department of Justice in 2021, with approximately 11% of the incidents triggering federal criminal investigations; in one of the first cases brought by the DOJ task force, a Nebraska man in October was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making online threats to Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold, a prominent voting rights advocate. Such threats are “disturbing” on their own, Griswold tells me. But what’s worse is the way lies and violent rhetoric are being “mainstreamed” by Trump and other Republican leaders. “They are inciting violence,” Griswold says.“‘The big lie’ has grown tremendously over the last two years,” adds Griswold. “The environment is much more concerning.”