Threats, intimidation and legal action. Skeptics strain NC election workers

Shortly after the 2018 election, Buncombe County election workers were chitchatting over coffee when a voter walked in the office door.

They jumped to greet the stranger almost as if they were celebrating the arrival of an old friend. Their enthusiasm and unintentional coordination caused the visitor to chuckle at the over-the-top service, says Corinne Duncan, the executive director of the county’s elections board.

Four years later, the mood has dampened, she says. The staff’s workload has increased as more voters have challenged the integrity of elections — something that didn’t happen as often back then. The chipper greetings have faded. And, as threats against election workers rise, they now fear who might walk through the door.

When the time came to design a new reception area this year, Duncan said, she received a special request: “My front desk staff asked for bulletproof glass.”

Over the past two years, election officials in North Carolina have faced an onslaught of complaints, records requests, intimidation and aggression from election skeptics, including many peddling disproven election conspiracies.

The activity has stretched already-thin county and state election staffs, taking time away from their efforts to mind the very issues these doubters are raising. In at least one North Carolina county, threats have sucked resources from local law enforcement.

The scenario, which is being played out in counties across the country, has in part contributed to higher-than-usual turnover among election workers and fears that the challenges will deter strong applicants to replace them.

In the past three years, 43 of the state’s 100 county election directors have resigned or retired, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

“The current environment, including increased demands and hostility toward these public servants, has led state and county elections workers, as well as poll workers, to leave their positions,” said Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the state board.

Many of the recent accusations and demands from voters have echoed the false claims of former President Donald Trump and top allies: that bad actors — within the elections apparatus or elsewhere — somehow changed vote tallies by hacking voting machines to steal the election for Democrats. To the surprise of many election workers, these allegations persist in North Carolina even though Trump carried the state, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis won reelection, and the GOP maintained control of the state legislature.

These facts haven’t stopped citizens and small watchdog groups from seeking reams of election records—just to review them for accuracy. And in many cases, small election staffs are bound by law to fill the flood of requests.

In Buncombe County, for instance, officials received a records request for every envelope that absentee-by-mail ballots were returned in. The request came after voting had begun in 2020. To fulfill it, Duncan said, the staff would have to redact identifying information from tens of thousands of envelopes.

“We didn’t have the manpower or the technology to redact properly,” she said. “So we couldn't stop our job of conducting the elections to build the request.”

The requester sued, leading to even more paperwork.

At one point in 2020, Gannon said, the state elections board faced a record 33 lawsuits at once. To handle a rising number of inquiries ahead of the 2020 election, the state elections board purchased new software for processing public records requests. The board received 48 records requests in the final seven months of 2020, 229 requests last year and is on record pace to double that number this year.

At times, the wave of phone calls and emails seemed like “a concerted effort to overburden us,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the state board’s executive director.

Brunswick County’s election director, Sara Lavere, feels the same way. She says she’s getting more—and bigger—requests with vague parameters from people whose identities and motives are difficult to decipher. Duty bound, she follows up. “I say, ‘I'm not really sure what you're looking for. Can you clarify what you need?’ ” Lavere said. “And it's almost like they can't answer it. They don’t know. … ‘Did somebody tell you to ask me this?’ ”

Election skepticism isn’t new in North Carolina. In 2016, then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, cast doubt on the legitimacy of ballots counted late on election night in Durham County that lifted his Democratic opponent, now-Gov. Roy Cooper, to victory. Then the results of North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District race in 2018 were thrown out after investigators uncovered an absentee ballot scheme that muddied the legitimacy of the election.

Before the 2020 election, the state elections board strained its relationship with Republicans when it reached a legal agreement with a voting rights group that had sued to temporarily loosen some election laws. Republicans slammed the settlement, accusing the majority-Democrat board of conspiring with like-minded activists to circumvent laws passed by GOP legislators.

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Skepticism has also come from the left in recent weeks. The state’s elections board voted against adding the Green Party to November ballots amid an investigation into signatures collected as part of the party’s bid for ballot access. The move stoked skepticism among Green Party leaders about the motivations of the Democrat-controlled board. Democrats would benefit from the liberal Green Party’s exclusion. Brinson Bell has said that the board is adhering to state law in vetting the petition.

Still, election officials point to Trump’s denial of presidential election results as the impetus for more organized and more aggressive challenges to election officials. The newfound scrutiny on elections extends beyond the average citizen or watchdog group; the state board has increasingly had to address inquiries from lawmakers.

Emails obtained by WRAL News show that Republican state legislators have spent months asking the elections board for data from the 2020 election while also demanding the board disprove theories that votes were illegally changed in North Carolina.

Meanwhile, conservative operatives have launched at least two election watchdog groups in North Carolina that have peppered the state board with records requests.

Among them: The Electoral Education Foundation, led by Hal Weatherman, former chief of staff and campaign manager for former Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. Forest was one of the few Republicans to lose a statewide race in 2020. In an email to WRAL, Weatherman said he wants to bring more transparency to an election system that he feels many Americans are losing trust in.

“We have one simple yet profound methodology,” Weatherman said. “Every time the N.C. Board of Elections updates the N.C. voter file, we take a screen grab of that file and archive it.” The group then analyzes the file updates in an attempt to isolate movements with a high correlation to fraud. “We are not looking for fraud, but rather structural vulnerabilities in the system that could be exploited by those wishing to commit fraud,” he said.

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Meanwhile, state records show that Jay DeLancy, a conservative known for his work with the right-leaning Voter Integrity Project, also incorporated a group known as Audit NC Elections PAC. Voter Integrity Project last year claimed in a blog post that many North Carolina voting machines had modems capable of being manipulated to adjust vote counts and called for a recount.

Brinson Bell had to take time to debunk the claim, writing a lengthy response explaining that the technology in question wasn’t present in North Carolina voting machines. She said there’s no evidence any North Carolina voting machine was manipulated, adding that a full, hand-eye recount “would be unnecessary, costly, time-consuming and a huge burden to N.C. counties.”

Republican state Rep. George Cleveland, who forwarded the blog post to the state board, also had a meeting with the elections board in October to discuss rumors of election fraud promoted by Mike Lindell, a prominent Trump supporter and founder of My Pillow Inc. The elections board asked the North Carolina National Guard’s ”Cyber Security Response Force” to investigate the allegations. In a written response to Cleveland, the board said Lindell’s report about North Carolina was “undoubtedly false with clear indications of fabrication.”

Cleveland didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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“This is a trend around the country driven in part by a massive amount of election-related misinformation, and it is tying up a significant amount of election resources,” said Gannon, the state board spokesman.

More than three-quarters of election officials say threats against them have increased, and more than half say they’re concerned about the safety of their colleagues, according to the survey, which was conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group in late January and early February on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank affiliated with the New York University School of Law.

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In Buncombe County, the reception staff didn’t get their bulletproof glass, but they do now sit in a place with reduced public access, according to Duncan, the county’s elections director. Duncan has added three staff positions to deal with an increased workload.

Nearly one-third of the officials who responded to the Brennan Center survey said they know of election workers who have left their jobs because of safety concerns, threats or intimidation.

Twenty percent of election officials themselves say they’re unlikely to continue serving through 2024. The increased threats are also leaving officials worried about their ability to retain and or hire local election workers, the survey said. And more than half worry that new election officials will subscribe to false claims about the 2020 elections.

In Chatham County, elections director Pandora Paschal worries the political climate will make it harder to recruit seasonal workers and volunteers for elections. The days can be long and the job requirements are highly specialized, requiring hours of training.

“It's hard to keep them,” Paschal said. “And basically you have all eyes on elections now, so that puts pressure.”

Paschal and other elections directors praised their staffs for their work in the 2020 election—processing a record number of absentee ballots all while navigating a pandemic. And yet, when the job was done, they faced more scrutiny than ever before.

It can be deflating, they said, but they’re determined to speak out against misinformation that undermines their hard work. Some directors say their role now requires them not just to oversee election procedures but to defend them and act as an ambassador of their local operation.

Paschal has stayed on the phone through some tense conversations. Lavere said she’s signing up to speak at every senior center in Brunswick County. Duncan says she spoke at the Buncombe County Republican Women’s Club.

“It was supposed to be an [hour-long] talk about integrity and we ended up being there for two hours,” Duncan said. “They were not easy on us, by any stretch. But I really enjoyed that honest conversation.”

Some of the positive feedback “was magic to me,” she said. “That is what we need to be doing. It's hard, hard work. But we have to make those personal connections.”