Threats Against Election Officials Mount Following 2020 Fraud Lies

The folks at Reuters have poured quite a lot of time and effort into the task of making me feel completely hopeless about the future of the country, and I hope they’re happy about it, damn them.

In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept. In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die. “This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

That last part is truly alarming. It’s bad enough that right-wing fanaticism has been marbled through police departments throughout the country, but if that fanaticism is shared by prosecutors, or even if it merely scares them out of doing their jobs, then we’re all going to wake up one morning in a failed state with strip malls.

And they’re proud of themselves.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request…

Ross Miller, a Georgia real-estate investor, warned an official in the Atlanta area that he’d be tarred and feathered, hung or face firing squads unless he addressed voter fraud. In an interview, Miller said he would continue to make such calls “until they do something.” He added: “We can’t have another election until they fix what happened in the last one.”

There’s no mystery about these people. They have swallowed whole the poison fed to them by the right-wing media ecosystem and then chased it with the snake oil peddled by the former president* about the last presidential election. And none of the institutions dedicated to keeping the wild kingdom in check seems willing or able to do that job.

In many cases, they didn’t investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America’s patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.

Instead, we get this.

Only one of the nine harassers Reuters interviewed wouldn’t reveal his identity: the man threatening Vermont officials. Before reporters started examining him, law enforcement officials had decided against investigating, as many other agencies have done in similar cases nationwide. Late last year, between Nov. 22 and Dec. 1, he left three messages with the secretary of state’s office from a number that state police deemed “essentially untraceable,” according to an internal police email obtained through a public-records request.

The man identified himself as a Vermont resident in one voicemail. Police didn’t pursue a case on the grounds that he didn’t threaten a specific person or indicate an imminent plan to act, according to emails and prosecution records. State police never spoke with the caller, according to interviews with state officials, a law enforcement source and a review of internal police emails.

Reuters did. Reporters connected with him in September on the phone number police called untraceable. In five conversations over four days spanning more than three hours, he acknowledged threatening Vermont officials and described his thinking.

Jesus, this is embarrassing. The police “couldn’t find” this guy, but reporters did, and with relative ease, too. And the guy is plainly a dangerous nut.

He soon grew agitated, peppering two Reuters reporters with 137 texts and voicemails over the past month, threatening the journalists and describing his election conspiracy theories. The man telephoned the secretary of state’s office again on Oct. 17 from the same phone number used in the other threats. This time he was more explicit. Addressing state staffers and referring to the two journalists by name, he said he guaranteed that all would soon get “popped.”

“You guys are a bunch of f‑‑‑‑‑‑ clowns, and all you dirty c‑‑‑suckers are about to get f‑‑‑‑‑‑ popped,” he said. “I f‑‑‑‑‑‑ guarantee it.”

The level of violence humming barely below the surface of our politics is intensifying. In Boston over the weekend, anti-mask protestors and counter-protestors got into a serious rumble on the Common. Rep. Paul Gosar, the lunatic from Arizona, posted a piece of anime that depicted Gosar murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez with a sword. So far, no action has been taken against Gosar, and none is likely, especially from Republican leader Kevin McCarthy. From the Washington Post:

A Gosar staffer defended the video Monday night, dismissing claims that it glorifies violence. “Everyone needs to relax,” Gosar’s digital director, Jessica Lycos, said in a statement.

And there’s Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana, who seems unaware that Mel Gibson already made Braveheart.

“Let me be clear to all the oppressors. You’ve drawn a line in the sand. Be prepared to defend your position .. We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees … Some of us are prepared to carry that fight with every drop of our blood.”

The most amazing thing about all of these events since the storming of the Capitol is how little these people seem to care that the authorities, and the rest of us, know who they are and what they believe. This is the impunity of people who believe not only that they are beyond the law, but that the law is on their side.

In an interview, Miller acknowledged making the call. “I left the message because I’m a patriot, and I’m sick and tired of what’s going on in this country,” he said. “That’s what happens when you commit treason: You get hung.” Miller, who said he was in his sixties, said he’s been kicked off Twitter seven times for his views. He follows “Tore Says,” a podcast popular with QAnon adherents whose host, Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, has called for a “revolutionary movement.”

“You’ve got to stand up,” said Miller. “You’re either a patriot for the freedom of this country or you’re a communist against it.”

I’ll be skipping lunch today.

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