As threats grow, funds for election security see a squeeze

Phoenix (CNN) — When the ballot counting begins inside Arizona’s Maricopa County Tabulation Center this November, election workers will be protected behind doors and windows with bullet-proof glass and two layers of fencing. Security cameras will be monitored for suspicious activity inside and outside the building. A fleet of police drones and rooftop snipers will be at the ready.

In many ways, the county’s election headquarters has been transformed into “a fortress,” says Bill Gates, a member of the county’s Board of Supervisors who has received repeated death threats for rejecting bogus claims that officials helped steal elections in 2020 and 2022. He says the new safety measures reflect “the reality of elections in 2024.”

Such precautions were unheard of a few years ago. But during the ballot count in 2020, when armed MAGA protesters — inflamed by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election cheating — swarmed the tabulation center and forced police to lock workers and reporters inside for their own safety, county leaders decided more needed to be done. That’s why Maricopa County has spent over $864,000 in federal funds and more than $3 million in county funds to bolster its election security and processes over the past four years.

But that level of planning and preparation stands in stark contrast with that of many other locales across the country with similar worries about election-related turmoil this November.

A CNN review has found that, amid an exodus of experienced workers and leaders, election officials across the country have struggled to enhance security measures to adequately safeguard workers and ensure voting integrity in advance of Election Day. Officials readily shared their worries with CNN, citing death threats, harassment, baseless lawsuits, onerous public-records requests and various security threats spurred by false claims about voter fraud.

Amid these challenges, budgets for election security have been squeezed in several ways. In recent years, Congress has slashed funding under the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the main dedicated source of federal money to help run and secure elections. Then, too, for a variety of reasons, many states have been slow to spend millions of dollars of the available HAVA money. And legislatures in more than half of US states, many of them buying into election disinformation, have barred or limited the use of private funds that many election officials say helped them run secure elections in 2020.

“A drop in the bucket”

As chairman of the nation’s Election Assistance Commission, Ben Hovland has unique insight into the woes of election officials as they gear up for this year’s presidential contest.

“Elections are harder than they’ve ever been to run and administer in the US, and they’re more expensive than ever,” Hovland told CNN. “Election officials are having to prepare for so many things: the cybersecurity challenges; the physical challenges; dealing with a lot of inaccurate information about election processes and procedures; and educating the public about those things. Offices are inundated with lawsuits and information requests related to that misinformation.”

Hovland concedes that funding available under the Help America Vote Act to help deal with those issues is “a drop in the bucket” compared with the demands of state and local election officials.

From a high of $425 million in the 2020 fiscal year, nationwide funding for election security under HAVA fell to $55 million in the spending bill for this fiscal year passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in March.

Biden called for increasing HAVA funding to $1.6 billion in his proposed budget for next fiscal year. But it will be up to a deeply divided Congress to decide whether and how much to provide.

Election officials say they need money to hire and properly train poll workers; construct physical barriers to protect election workers and buildings; acquire scanners and other equipment to verify signatures on mail-in ballots; install additional security cameras; provide fire retardant for rooms to store ballots; and much more.

Many offices have sought new protections for opening mail-in ballots after election offices in California, Georgia, Nevada, Oregon, Texas and Washington received suspicious envelopes, some laced with fentanyl, last November. This past week, another round of suspicious packages were reported to the FBI and the US Postal Service by secretaries of state or election offices in at least 20 states, including the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. At least some of the envelopes had a return address in Takoma Park, Maryland, and claimed be from a group called the “United States Traitor Elimination Army,” according to a photo of one of the envelopes obtained by CNN.

The price tag for bringing systems up to date across the whole country is enormous: $53 billion over the current decade to replace aging voting machines, update voter registration systems, improve cybersecurity and administer elections, according to a 2021 study commissioned by the nonpartisan Center for Tech and Civil Life and the Center for Secure and Modern Elections.

But some GOP leaders dismiss the need for more funding. At a May 15 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma rattled off a list of states that had spent little or none of their recent HAVA grants, saying, “We have states that have literally millions of dollars sitting there saying, ‘We don’t have enough to do this,’ when most of them do.” He noted that in recent years, “Louisiana has received $14.5 million and has spent zero of it so far.”

The Election Assistance Commission, which administers the grants, reported in June that at the end of last fiscal year states were sitting on more than $400 million in HAVA election-security grants issued between 2018 and 2023. That includes battleground states such as Nevada, which had spent just 41% of its grant funding, and Michigan, which reported having spent barely half.

But Hovland told CNN that it’s common for states to save up HAVA grants for years to help pay for big, expensive projects. For example, he said, Louisiana hasn’t spent its funds because it plans to replace its paperless voting system; but “the day they sign that contract, they’ll have spent all of it.” When Delaware replaced its electronic voting system in 2018, it cost more than $13 million. Federal funds only covered $3 million of that total, he said.

Fear and loathing

Just last month, two men — one in Virginia and one in Colorado — were indicted after allegedly threatening to kill election officials and workers in Maricopa County. Thousands of election workers across the country have reported receiving harassing, offensive or hostile communications, including since the 2022 midterms, according to the Department of Justice’s Election Threats Task Force. Many interviewed by CNN have reported threats to themselves or their colleagues. While lots of those threats have focused on officials in battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, officials from Oregon to South Carolina told CNN they’ve received death threats too.

“We’re not like Arizona or Georgia, with everything they’ve been through, but at polling places, the attitudes have been contentious and aggressive at times; and we have had people receive death threats,” said John Michael Catalano, a spokesman for the South Carolina Election Commission.

The hostile climate is having an impact. Across the country, chief election officials have left office at a sharply higher rate over the past few years, with a 39% turnover between 2018 and 2022, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The center said the number of officials leaving continues at a high rate heading toward the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, local election officials across the country told CNN they’ve had trouble keeping and hiring experienced workers because of low pay in what amounts to a lion’s den atmosphere.

“People drop out left and right based on the national climate,” said Isaac Cramer, executive director of the Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections in South Carolina.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, election workers have quit, saying they couldn’t “do another presidential election because of the level of stress, the inappropriate behavior,” said County Clerk Katharine Clark.

“We’re asking people to do very stressful, high-profile work, and we’re not seeing the pay that job requires,” she said.

Many local election officials say that in 2020, they were able to boost worker pay or buy new equipment to make elections run more smoothly and safely thanks to private funds that offered help.

But that source of funding has been squeezed, too, largely for reasons tied to false claims of election interference.

Cramer, in Charleston, said his county’s election board used the $695,000 it received in private grants in 2020 to buy a high-speed mail sorter, a machine to open ballot envelopes and a mobile voting trailer. They also used the funds to run advertisements explaining the vote-by-mail process and to hire more poll workers.

But Cramer isn’t even looking for privately funded election grants this time around. “Now that’s barred by the state legislature,” he said. “I have a county council saying there are grants out there. But we can’t apply for them anymore.”

The “Zuckerbucks” lies

Four years ago, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated about $420 million through two nonprofits to promote safe and reliable voting. More than 2,500 county and state election offices around the country applied for and received grants.

Zuckerberg already had been demonized by Republicans over claims that Facebook was censoring or suppressing the pages of conservatives. Before the 2020 presidential election, Trump allies filed suits in several states to block the use of the election grants, claiming, without evidence, that they would be steered to Democratic strongholds. After Trump lost, he and many of his GOP supporters falsely claimed that what they dubbed “Zuckerbucks” had helped Biden win.

The bipartisan Federal Election Commission, in a unanimous vote, rejected the accusation. And courts in several states determined that the accusations were untrue.  In fact, more money from those donations went to election offices in places where Trump won than where Biden won, according to an analysis by the FEC.

But the lies took on a life of their own; and since 2020, 28 states, mostly GOP-controlled, have adopted laws or ballot initiatives to ban the use of private donations for elections. That includes the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Election officials said the 2020 donations by Zuckerberg and Chan filled a vital need as an unprecedented pandemic led to a surge of voting by mail and other challenges.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said his office used $10,000 to improve their website so voters could more easily find their options for voting. “We have 72 counties in Wisconsin, and most are red,” said Christenson. “Most smaller counties benefited from those dollars. That’s the dirty little secret Republicans don’t want people to know.”

But here, too, the misinformation has had its effect. On August 26, Zuckerberg wrote to GOP House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, saying he won’t repeat his 2020 election donations. “I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” he wrote. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”

“This is an act of insurrection”

Even before Biden was confirmed to have won Arizona by just under 11,000 votes four years ago, the state had become ground zero for off-the-wall election nonsense — claims of votes changed with Sharpies, bamboo ballots from China, supposed shenanigans with the machines tallying the votes. As the bogus assertions spread wildly on social media, far-right figures such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones swooped in to lead angry protests against the vote count.

Then-state GOP chair Kelli Ward and 17 others, including Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, were eventually indicted over their roles in submitting a false slate of electors to Congress.  Most have pleaded not guilty, though one elector recently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge, and former Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis agreed in August to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for charges against her being dropped.

Even though many prominent election deniers lost to Democrats in the 2022 midterms, state GOP leaders and many key candidates have doubled down on denialism and threats against those who resist it. As recently as Tuesday, Trump threatened to prosecute and imprison election officials if he wins in November, as he cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming election.

Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, who lost in her bid as the GOP candidate for governor by 17,000 votes in 2022, still insists Trump’s 2020 loss was a “sham.” She continues battling in court to overturn her 2022 defeat, even though her attorneys have been sanctioned more than $124,000 by federal and state courts for making baseless allegations of fraud and claims that electronic ballot tabulations machines are suspect. She’s now the party’s nominee for Senate.

Such denialism continues to create turmoil in the state.

In late February, a routine meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors ended in chaos when pro-Trump election deniers rushed the podium, shouting that the mostly Republican board members were illegitimate. Security guards rushed the board members out a side door and called for backup from the county sheriff’s office.

Just last month, an Arizona Superior Court judge batted down a far-right group’s records request for the names of all Maricopa County election workers who’ve come in contact with ballots since 2020. Judge Scott Blaney found that “the threats and harassment that these employees face are both alarming and pervasive.”

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who rejects election denialism, reported one such graphic threat against him to the county sheriff’s office and the FBI on July 27.  Within days, the FBI arrested a Virginia man who had also posted obscenity-laced threats against Vice President Kamala Harris and other officials.

While Arizona’s August 6 primary ran smoothly, Sgt. Jeff Woolf, who works in the county sheriff’s counterterrorism unit, said the sheriff’s office is working hard to ensure the general election in November does too. “Times have changed,” he said. “Our responsibility is to be prepared for all aspects” of elections.

“We want to make sure everyone involved with elections, from people casting their ballots to people going out and working in the election for the election department, feel safe,” Woolf said. “We’re just going to continue to plan accordingly and make sure that we have all the resources we need. … It’s important to be prepared so everyone has that opportunity to vote.”

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