Across the country, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, Tina Barton had her own brush with election-related violence.
For more than three decades, Barton, a Republican, served in government, eventually landing the role of city clerk. That office required her to administer elections and maintain voter files, among other duties.
But over the years, she had seen tensions rise. There were early signs of discord in the 2000 election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W Bush, a race decided by a few thousand votes in Florida.
Barton also noticed election denialism years later, in 2016. At the time, Green Party candidate Jill Stein pushed for long-shot recounts in three battleground states, including Michigan, after she finished fourth in the presidential race.
As that effort fizzled, Stein decried, “We do not have a voting system we can trust.”
In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams was also defiant after her 2018 gubernatorial loss to Brian Kemp, accusing Republicans of “rigging” the system in their favour, though she acknowledged they were acting within the laws in place at the time.
But those nascent signs of increased scepticism turned into something different following the 2020 vote, Barton said.
For Barton, that newfound spotlight on election workers came with threats.
After Trump’s defeat in 2020, much of the scrutiny fell on battleground states that Republicans narrowly lost, including Michigan.
Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel referred to Barton by name when she falsely claimed that 2,000 votes had been wrongfully diverted to Democrat Joe Biden.
In reality, Barton and her team had discovered a clerical error in the vote tally, correcting it to ensure accurate results as part of normal election procedures.
But the damage had been done. Hearing Barton’s name falsely associated with election fraud sparked an onslaught of scrutiny and threats. One caller — citing Trump’s false claims about the election — even left death threats on her voicemail just a few days after the race.
“I did not expect to go to my office and pick up my own phone, my own voicemail, and have someone call me by name and say: ‘When you least expect it, we will kill you,'” Barton said.
Barton lost her race for city clerk that year and has since focused on training other election officials. But she has a message for powerful political figures.
“When you’re an individual with a platform and who has followers … you have to take responsibility for the words that you’re saying,” Barton said.
Members of the public, she underscored, “may take those words as directives to take action”.
Barton was hardly alone in contending with intimidation after the vote. Thousands of threats have been reported against state, county and city election officials, as well as poll workers, since the 2020 vote.
Examples abound. Al Schmidt, a former election commissioner in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, testified before Congress in 2022 that he and his family were threatened after Trump falsely claimed there was a “mountain of corruption” in the city’s elections.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also received months of threats after he resisted Trump’s appeal to “find” more votes in the state.
Also in Georgia, mother-and-daughter election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss went into hiding after Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani helped push a conspiracy theory that the two women stashed ballots in suitcases. They later won $148m in a defamation suit against Giuliani.
Earlier this year, the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting policy institute, found that 38 percent of the local election officials it surveyed “experienced threats, harassment, or abuse for doing their jobs”.
In April last year, the centre also found a high likelihood of turnover among election workers. It estimated that 11 percent of election officials were likely to resign from their posts before the November 2024 election.
“The loss of institutional knowledge that accompanies such high turnover can mean that election officials are less aware of resources available to assist them in securing and running their elections,” the centre warned.
Last month, a dedicated Department of Justice task force revealed that, since its launch in 2021, it had received 2,000 referrals for election worker threats and opened 100 investigations. The agency has so far charged 20 people, winning 15 convictions.
Meanwhile, voting experts have said many of this year’s battleground states have failed to pass straightforward reforms that could help stem misinformation.
That includes Pennsylvania, where state legislators rejected a bill that would have allowed mail-in ballots to be processed before election day, thereby facilitating a speedy count.
Theresa Lee, senior staff lawyer at the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said the move is “setting the stage for major delays on election night and putting millions of ballots at risk”.
State election officials, she added, “should be strengthening voter confidence — not weakening it”.
With tensions expected to run high on election day, officials and poll workers across the country say they are taking steps to prepare like never before.
In Cobb County, Georgia, election workers have received panic buttons to push, with a direct line to the local sheriff’s office. Meanwhile, in Durham County, North Carolina, election centres are now equipped with bulletproof glass.
And in Los Angeles, California, dogs have been employed to sniff mail-in ballots to detect any dangerous substances.
There has also been a surge in training, led by groups like the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, where Barton is now a senior election expert.
Also affiliated with the group is Chris Harvey, the former police officer and state elections director for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
Harvey has been leading sessions with local law enforcement and election officials in Georgia, to help plan for contingencies. One training took place recently in Cobb County.
Harvey noticed that election workers and law enforcement had different ideas about what their roles would be in such a crisis.
“The election people believed or assumed that, if a bomb threat was called in to a polling place, the police would show up, shut everything down, evacuate everyone, search the place for however long it took,” he said.
“The police said, ‘Actually, we don’t do that. We will respond and we will search the area to see if we see anything suspicious or problematic. But it’s up to the election officials to decide if you want to shut it down.'”
Any coordination between police and election officials is delicate, Harvey explained, as the presence of law enforcement can be seen as a deterrent for voting.
But the fact that both sides are collaborating underscores a “stark contrast”. Before 2020, violence was not considered as big a threat. Now, it’s expected.
“It’s night and day,” Harvey said. “It’s a completely different atmosphere.”
Joseph Kirk — the election supervisor in Bartow County, where Montgomery worked — also acknowledged he has had to consider events this year that once seemed like distance fears.
“I never expected to see my fears realised in the way we’ve seen across the country since 2020,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But I’m not gonna let a lack of understanding from people and animosity from people drive me away from something that I love.”