Election officials from closely contested states around the country opened up to USA Today Monday about the racist and violent threats from Trump supporters that bombarded them in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
This comes as former President Donald Trump is indicted in two separate cases relating to the plot to overturn the 2020 election, including a racketeering probe in Georgia that also charged several of his legal advisers and state Republican operatives.
Philadelphia City Commissioner Omar Sabir is one of the people who described his experience. He was helping to count the votes in Pennsylvania when a group of armed men from Virginia were apprehended heading to his location to "straighten out" the election. "We basically kept going on ... because we knew that there was a duty that had to be done, and so I wasn't going to be unwavered by that," Sabir told USA Today.
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"As I reflect back now, that's like kind of crazy that ... some (weapons) were actually a stone's throw from where you were at just completing the job."
Michigan state Rep. Cynthia Johnson said that, as she questioned Trump attorney Jenna Ellis about her election conspiracy theories during a hearing of the state House Oversight Committee, Trump supporters bombarded her computer with racist threats. “As I'm sitting there as (a Black woman) in the room, I'm feeling threatened ... thank God for our sergeants that were there," Johnson said.
A number of other officials told USA Today that their experiences with election deniers were traumatizing.
"It was terrifying and just ... you have some guilt in having your family in the public eye and having their lives disrupted," said Georgia state Sen. Elena Parent, who similarly questioned Ellis and Rudy Giuliani and called their theories a "rabbit hole," only to be harassed by QAnon extremists.
Another official, Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley, who was threatened by a Trump supporter over a conspiracy theory that Trump's poll watchers were barred from watching the ballot count, said, “It's important for people to know that this had a real effect on real people. It had a real effect on me. It had a real effect on my staff. It had residual effects on my family, on my social circle. Still today, going forward, it has lingering effects on everything that I do."
Ahead of upcoming elections, Democrats have proposed a $10 million plan to beef up security for election officials.
