With U.S. Democracy Under Attack, Women Election Officials Hold the Front Lines

[niyad]

With U.S. Democracy Under Attack, Women Election Officials Hold the Front Lines
9/20/2022 by Katie Usalis
Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election inspired threats and harassment against election officials—most of whom are women. As we head into the midterms, here’s how we can support these essential workers.

“You lied. You a traitor. Perhaps 75 cuts and 20 bullets will soon arrive.”

“You and your family will be killed very slowly.”

“If you send me any more emails about this election, I’m to slit your throat.”

These are just three examples among thousands of hostile or threatening messages received by election officials following the 2020 presidential election. An eye-opening survey commissioned by NYU Law’s Brennan Center for Justice in mid-2021 found that “one in three election officials feel unsafe because of their job, and nearly one in five listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern.” The vast majority—more than 80 percent—of these officials are women. Here women are, rolling up their sleeves. Stepping up to the plate and doing the stressful, exhausting and poorly paid work that quite literally gives us a democracy—their job to ensure that elections are held in a professional manner and that every valid vote is counted—now having to brave threats to their lives and their children and pinch pennies in order to afford a home security system. Yet in the many conversations around election reform, women, especially women of color, aren’t included. The ones most impacted by the problems are also the ones absent from the decision-making table. Ms. sat down with some women who should be at that table—Gowri Ramachandran, senior counsel at the Brennan Center, and two officials who served in the 2020 election: Natalie Adona from Nevada County, Calif., and Tina Barton from Rochester Hills, Mich.—to hear about their experiences as women on the front lines protecting our democracy.



Tina Barton, top left, explains how to use new voting machines during a press conference Wednesday morning, Aug. 2, 201, in the Rochester Hills Clerk’s Office in City Hall in Rochester Hills, Mich. (Shannon Millard / The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP)

This conversation has been edited for publication.

Ms.: Last year your team at the Brennan Center released a report titled “Election Officials Under Attack.” What kinds of violent threats did you find that election officials have faced since the 2020 election?

Gowri Ramachandran: For the report we interviewed dozens of local and state election officials in one-on-one interviews about what they have experienced and it was heartbreaking. I mean, I had tissues out in some of these interviews, so did the election officials. People experienced racist language, misogynous language that I can’t even repeat in this interview and threats towards their children and their elderly family members. When you are in public service you’re sometimes going to get disgruntled voters, confused voters. But they all, really universally, reported to us that this was an increase in this kind of behavior like nothing they had ever seen before. And the vitriol and the violent rhetoric in some of these messages and threats they received—most of them had never received anything like that. This came as a huge shock. Especially when they had all worked so hard to try to protect people’s physical health and safety while also helping them participate in an important election in 2020. If we don’t have democracy, we don’t have freedom. Our system works because we have people who are knowledgeable, who know how elections work.


Natalie Adona

Ms.: As election officials you have been in the thick of it. What did you experience in the aftermath of the 2020 election?

Natalie Adona: My biggest memory of Nov. 3, 2020, is that it was calm and orderly and [there were] very few complaints. It was really after that election when the political rhetoric ramped up about election fraud and flat-out lies about the election. So the short story is that I initiated a COVID protocol [for the county elections office]. It was dissatisfying to some of our citizens who had initiated a recall of our board of supervisors, and three of them decided that they were going to push their way into my office and the door struck one of my staff members. I did not know what they were intending to do. One of them actually threatened me. And it resulted in a bigger group of people coming the next day with these big flagpoles, and we were trapped in my office. There were about 15 people in our hall. Our doors were locked, and these proponents were banging on the doors. They had these big flagpoles that, for all I knew, could be used as weapons, and they were stationing themselves outside of our doors. They were there for like an hour, and it was incredibly unnerving.
. . . . .



Nevada County, Calif., is a rural region in the Sierra Nevada mountains. (Facebook)

Tina Barton: For me, obviously 2020 was the most trying and challenging election of my career. I had been running elections for at least 15 years at that point. We had a situation in our city where an error was made by the team when we were submitting our results, and a file was sent two times. It was caught afterwards, within a matter of hours of submission, and we backed that out and corrected that, which is what the canvas period is for. It was reported in the news. We reported it. We kind of felt like it had run its course. We had educated everybody on what had happened and then everything was fine. It was immediately caught and corrected. A few days after that, a national political figure held a press conference, and they insinuated or inferred that the party had found 2,000 ballots in my city that belonged to [Donald] Trump and were given to [Joe] Biden and really misrepresented and mischaracterized what had happened there. I was stunned because I was on that ballot as a Republican. I was the county nominee for the Republican side for the Oakland County Clerk’s Office Register of Deeds. I, too, lost my election, as did Trump in that county.

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https://msmagazine.com/2022/09/20/women-election-security-officials-democracy-threat-attack/