![]() The increase in threats has also caught the attention of the Department of Justice. ![]() “People have a First Amendment right, but there’s people that are still buying into false statements that are out there about machines as well as about elections,” said Latimer, a Democrat. ![]() The effort unnerved some attendees at the conference, who talked about getting threats and witnessing a spike of conspiracy-laden phone calls from voters echoing Trump’s rhetoric about the 2020 election.Ĭraig Latimer, the elections supervisor for Tampa’s Hillsborough County, said there are people who just refuse to accept what happened in 2020. Standing outside the downtown Tampa hotel hosting the conference, they held signs that read “Stop the Steal” and “Donald Trump won.” One shouted on a bullhorn that everyone attending the conference was “un-American” and that Florida should end mail-in voting, a decades-old practice that has long been popular and widely used among state Republicans - including Trump himself. This year, it attracted several dozen pro-Trump protesters complaining that election laws in Florida, which Trump carried twice, are too lax. The conference, which sometimes delves into highly technical issues, usually attracts little attention. Florida’s local election supervisors met this week in Tampa at their semiannual conference. Protests have become more common as well. “I think that the big danger here is especially if those positions - which, again, are typically pretty obscure - are targeted to replace those professional election administrators with partisan political operatives whose job it is to undermine confidence” in the electoral system, Schmidt continued. Schmidt said he already decided before this election to not run for another term as commissioner in 2023, but the threats he has faced since Trump attacked him “certainly confirms for me that it was the right decision.” But the aftermath of the 2020 election has felt different to experienced administrators - most notably because of the threats election workers are still facing. Retirements after an election are normal for administrators, especially after running a presidential vote. “The real question is: Who replaces them when they leave?” “It’s a big challenge and, I think, a potential crisis for democracy,” said Lawrence Norden, the director of the election reform program at the Brennan Center, a left-leaning think tank. But conversations with a half-dozen experienced officials, as well as reporting on growing vacancies in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, points to many headed for the doors. The decentralized nature of American elections means that there is no body or agency tracking election worker retirements right now. “That is not something anyone anticipates or signs up for.” Schmidt, a Republican, announced in January that he will not seek reelection to his post in 2023. ![]() “What is normally a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children,” said Al Schmidt, one of the three members of Philadelphia’s city board of elections. ![]()
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