EDITORIAL: Voting in the age of intimidation

Librarians, jurors, school board members, legislators, health workers, teachers, city officials, prosecutors, coaches, candidates for public office, judges, journalists and election workers populate a diverse cross section of any society, but they have something in common in America. They have all been targeted with death threats.

Death threats have become a gruesome fad as a response to daily irritations by a fringe of the citizenry that may be small in number but can be perversely influential.

In some cases, this behavior is the product of evil intent combined with mind-numbing ignorance. To wit, one of the latest additions to the list of death threat targets is meteorologists.

The threats have come from people who are convinced that meteorologists create hurricanes, which are then employed by the deep state to punish areas populated by people of the MAGA persuasion. This belief is based on a pronouncement to that effect by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene has credibility among conspiracy-minded folks in matters of science because she also informed the nation that wild fires are caused by lasers from space.

The fallout from that unpleasant nonsense will probably be minimal—it’s not likely to result in a mass exodus from the ranks of TV weathermen and women. But other death threats, like those aimed at election workers, have proven to be so effective that it is not an exaggeration to say they are threats to democracy as well as the lives of their targets.

A survey of election workers by the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan policy and legal institute, found that about 40% of them had been targets of threats. More than half said they feared for the safety of their coworkers.

Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed it at a meeting of the Justice Departments Election Task Force: “Election officials, workers and volunteers in communities across the country have been targeted with heinous acts and threats of violence.”

FBI Director Chistopher Wray said, “The fact that election workers need to be worried about their security is incomprehensible and unacceptable.”

True enough, but the problem is that terrorizing election workers is quite acceptable to the morally bereft bad actors who are bent on undermining the foundation of the republic—the voting process.

It is an embarrassment to the nation that some voting districts have had to react to a wave of death threats by installing bulletproof glass at polling sites and planning to deploy armed guards during next Tuesday’s election.

Death threats are popular among the criminally minded because they are so easy. Perpetrators can hide behind the anonymity of the internet. Few carry out their threats. They don’t have to because making them is all that is needed to accomplish their purpose—to intimidate.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky, who has been a target of death threats since the high court rejected Donald Trump’s lawsuit to overturn 220,000 Biden votes in 2020, described what it is like:

“Personally, it’s terrifying. I worried for myself. I worried for my kids. It’s not something you think about. And when suddenly you are confronted with it, it stops you in your tracks.”

Election workers can relate. It’s why many of them have given up the work and others carry it on in fear.

In Wisconsin, the nonpartisan administrator of the state Election Commission, Meagan Wolfe, experienced a barrage of threats after legislators, without a scintilla of evidence, accused her of some vague wrongdoing in the 2020 election.

The BBC recently profiled an election volunteer in a tiny northern Wisconsin town who has been a target of threats.

If there have been similar issues in Ozaukee County, they haven’t been made public. But just the thought that the county, city, village and town clerks who administer the elections here and the volunteers who help them could be subject to intimidation as they do their good work is a sad comment on the times.

It’s not news that the unsettling tenor of these times derives from the falsehood being repeated to this day that victory in the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump by voting fraud. This has been disproven in every forum where it has been examined, but the threats keep coming.

Threats against various targets, maybe even those hurricane-making meteorologists, will go on, but those intended to overturn elections can be mitigated. Candidates can do it with a single sentence:

“I will accept the will of the voters and the outcome of the election, as should all citizens.”