Post Donald Trump’s 2020 loss?
Election Officials have a new resource….
A free legal service organization to support them….
The Election Official Legal Defense Network, which made its public debut on Sept. 7, offers to represent more than just poll workers, of course. Formed to counter the waves of political pressure and public bullying that election workers have faced in the last year, the organization pledges free legal services to anyone involved in the voting process, from secretaries of state to local election officials and volunteers.
The group already has received inquiries from several election officials, said David J. Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, which oversees the project. Without getting into details, Mr. Becker said their queries were “related to issues like harassment and intimidation.”
The network is the creation of two powerhouses in Republican and Democratic legal circles, Benjamin L. Ginsberg and Bob Bauer. In a Washington Post opinion piece this month, the two — Mr. Ginsberg was a premier G.O.P. lawyer for 38 years and Mr. Bauer was both a Democratic Party lawyer and White House counsel in the Obama administration — wrote that such attacks on people “overseeing the counting and casting of ballots on an independent, nonpartisan basis are destructive to our democracy.”….
….
The center is nonpartisan, offering to represent election workers of any political bent, whether they work in a red district or a blue one. But as the announcement by Mr. Ginsburg and Mr. Bauer implicitly noted, the problems confronting election workers ballooned only after the 2020 general election, and have come almost entirely from conservative supporters of Mr. Trump and legislators in Republican-controlled states.
One third of election workers say they feel unsafe in their jobs, according to a survey released this summer by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. In Colorado, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and other states, ardent believers in Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lies have threatened state and local election officials and their families with violence and even death. Some election workers have gone into hiding or sought police protection….
Glad to see this.
A few personal lawsuits on those who are harassing election officials is definitely called for.
Hit these scumbag thieves in the wallet!
The FBI has stepped up investigations of threats against election officials — in some cases, reaching out for the first time in recent weeks to election supervisors and others who have endured months of harassment, local officials tell CNN.
The activity stems from the creation earlier this summer of a Department of Justice task force to address the rising threats of violence against those officials. And it raises hopes among some election administrators that individuals might finally be held to account for the barrage of threats spurred by falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
“I don’t think people should be able to call with impunity to say whatever they want and to make threats,” said Richard Barron, who oversees elections in Fulton County, Georgia, and has spoken recently with two FBI agents. “I hope they make some arrests.”
Barron said he and his staff faced a torrent of threats and abuse after Democratic electoral victories last year in the traditionally red state. He said he recently shared two death threats with local FBI officials, including one made earlier this summer that warned he “would be served lead.”
Other officials contacted recently by the FBI include Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. In a recent interview on CNN, Woodall-Vogg estimated that she had received more than 150 threats.
Following the airing of that interview earlier this week, Woodall-Vogg said she got another “really sinister” email that she has since forwarded to the FBI.
In Arizona — another state that flipped from red to blue last year — Bill Gates, a Republican member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said an FBI agent visited him in late August to discuss the tsunami of harassment and threats there.
The Justice Department declined on Friday to comment on any specific, ongoing investigations.
But agency spokesman Joshua Stueve said the DOJ is “committed to aggressively addressing threats of violence directed toward state and local election officials and workers” and is coordinating with federal, state and local officials to “combat this recent and entirely unacceptable phenomenon.”
And in a statement, John Keller, a top attorney in the DOJ’s Public Integrity section who heads the new election task force, said the agency has specially designated federal agents and prosecutors “in every jurisdiction in the country” to work on the issue and is supplementing efforts by local and state authorities….
Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said her organization is considering helping to underwrite some of the security costs for the election chiefs who are members of the group.
“Without resources to monitor threats or provide security, the (DOJ) task force is of little comfort,” she said.
“We urge the Department of Justice to invest the resources needed to proactively monitor, report, and address threats,” she added. “Until then, we will continue to step up to ensure the safety of our secretaries.”…
By Fredreka Schouten, CNN
Updated 11:29 AM ET, Sat September 18, 2021
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/18/politics/fbi-threats-election-officials/index.html
Another ‘government’ action against Donald Trump’s effort to take it over….
What BETTER agency than the FBI which a President Trump worked HARD to shit all over?