The Surge in Threats Against Election Workers: How Trump's Targeting of Specific Officials and Processes Generated Thousands of Documented Threats Nationwide
Tier 3Ongoing2020-11-03 to 2026-04-09
Factual Summary
Following the 2020 presidential election, election workers across the United States experienced an unprecedented surge in threats, harassment, and intimidation. The Department of Justice's Election Threats Task Force reviewed more than 2,000 reports of threats against election workers in the years following its creation in June 2021. Surveys conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice found that one in three election officials reported feeling unsafe because of their job, and nearly one in five identified threats to their lives as a job-related concern. Subsequent surveys found that 38 percent of local election officials reported experiencing threats, harassment, or abuse, and 16 percent said they had been threatened because of their job, with 63 percent of those threatened being threatened in person.
The surge in threats followed a specific pattern: they increased after Donald Trump publicly targeted particular election workers, election officials, or election processes by name. The most documented case involved Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers whom Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani publicly accused of perpetrating fraud at the State Farm Arena vote-counting center in Fulton County, Georgia. Trump mentioned Freeman by name 18 times during a single phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, a call that was recorded and later made public. Giuliani amplified the allegations in public statements and media appearances.
Freeman and Moss testified before the House January 6 Committee that their lives changed overnight after being publicly named. They received hundreds of threats, were harassed in public, and feared for their physical safety. Freeman was forced to leave her home for months. Moss testified that she experienced depression, weight loss, and a fundamental loss of the sense of safety she had previously taken for granted. Both women ultimately won a $148 million defamation judgment against Giuliani in December 2023.
The Freeman and Moss case was the most prominent example, but the pattern extended nationwide. In Arizona, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer received death threats after Trump attacked the county's election administration. In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson reported armed protesters appearing at her home. In Philadelphia, election officials reported threats after Trump claimed the city was a site of fraud. In each case, the threats followed Trump's public statements targeting specific individuals or jurisdictions.
The Brennan Center documented that the threat environment drove experienced election administrators out of public service. In surveys conducted between 2021 and 2024, significant numbers of election officials reported considering leaving their positions due to safety concerns. The loss of experienced election workers created operational challenges for future elections and had a chilling effect on recruitment.
During Trump's second term, beginning in January 2025, the federal government reduced resources dedicated to election security. The Brennan Center reported that federal support for election worker safety was curtailed, and election officials surveyed in 2025 and 2026 indicated they wanted more support amid ongoing threats and federal cutbacks.
Primary Sources
1. Department of Justice Election Threats Task Force: review of more than 2,000 threat reports, 2021 to present
2. Brennan Center for Justice: "Election Officials Under Attack," survey results from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024
3. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack: testimony of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, June 21, 2022
4. Giuliani v. Freeman (defamation case): $148 million jury verdict, December 2023
5. Trump-Raffensperger phone call recording, January 2, 2021 (Trump mentions Ruby Freeman by name 18 times)
Corroborating Sources
1. PBS News: "Election workers are being bombarded with death threats, the U.S. government says," 2024
2. NBC News: "Almost 40% of local election officials surveyed report threats or abuse," 2024
3. Brennan Center: "Election Officials in Communities of Color Face More Abuse," 2024
4. Brennan Center: "Threats to Elections Didn't End on January 6," 2022
5. Brennan Center: "Survey Finds Election Officials Want More Support Amid Federal Cutbacks and Ongoing Threats," 2026
6. Brennan Center: "The Trump Administration's Campaign to Undermine the Next Election," 2025
Counterarguments and Context
Threats against public officials are made by individuals who bear personal responsibility for their actions. Trump's statements about election fraud, while directed at specific people and jurisdictions, did not explicitly call for violence against election workers. The First Amendment protects political speech, including harsh criticism of government officials, and drawing a direct causal line between political rhetoric and the actions of third parties is legally and analytically complex. Some election security concerns raised by Trump and his supporters, while not substantiated by evidence of widespread fraud, reflected genuine anxieties about election integrity that millions of Americans shared. The DOJ task force itself noted that the vast majority of threat reports were investigated and that relatively few resulted in federal charges, suggesting that many of the reported incidents may not have met the legal threshold for criminal threats. However, the temporal pattern is difficult to dismiss. Threats against election workers surged after Trump's public statements targeting them. The correlation between Trump naming specific individuals and the subsequent threats those individuals received is documented in sworn testimony, DOJ records, and survey data. The Freeman and Moss defamation verdict established through a civil proceeding that the specific allegations Trump and Giuliani made were false and caused quantifiable harm. The broader pattern, in which millions of Americans came to view election workers as enemies of democracy based on unsubstantiated claims, represents a documented consequence of Trump's rhetoric regardless of whether the legal standard for incitement is met.
Author's Note
This entry is classified as Tier 3 because the underlying evidence is primary: DOJ task force data, Brennan Center surveys of election officials, sworn congressional testimony, and a jury verdict in the Freeman defamation case. The causal link between Trump's statements and the surge in threats involves inference, but the temporal and geographic patterns are documented and consistent across multiple independent sources.