The attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Sunday was believed to be the second such attempt, the latest this year to highlight how threats of violence have become all too common for public servants in American society.
This is a threat that affects public officials at all levels, from presidential candidates like Trump, who have around-the-clock Secret Service protection, to lower-level judges and election officials, who don’t have that same level of protection.
The specter of violence has been looming over the 2024 election for months: Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) was house-swapped late last year after she removed President Trump from her presidential ballot, and Colorado Supreme Court justices received death threats after doing the same in December (their decision was ultimately overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court).
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who prosecuted Donald Trump in the hush-money case, has received more than 60 threats targeting him, his family and his office, the NYPD said in an affidavit earlier this year. Judge Juan Marchan, who presided over the case, has also received significant threats.
The threat of violence is especially serious for local election officials, who have few budgets and were largely unknown until the 2020 election. In Georgia, a key battleground county outside Atlanta recently voted to approve $50,000 for panic buttons for election workers and another $14,000 to hire security guards. Several other counties have reportedly expressed interest in panic buttons as well.
A national survey conducted in June by the Chicago Security and Threat Project (Cpost) found that 10% of respondents believed that violence was justified to stop President Trump from taking office. The same survey found that 6.8% of American adults believed that violence was justified to return President Trump. Until January, the survey found that supporters of Trump were more likely to support violence.
“All political leaders and presidential candidates should immediately condemn political violence, whether coming from the left or the right, and not wait for an escalating spiral to occur,” Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor who heads Cpost, said in an email Sunday.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have condemned both attempts on Trump’s life, but Trump, who has long relied on threats of violence since urging his supporters to beat up protesters during the 2016 election campaign, has denounced Harris.
“This communist left wing rhetoric is getting the bullets flying and making the situation worse!,” he said in a post on Truth Social. Trump ally Elon Musk wrote that “no one is trying to assassinate” Biden or Harris, before deleting the tweet and saying it was a joke.
The response came after threats were made to his own life, but also after years of spreading false claims of election fraud and putting others at risk.
A Brennan Center for Justice survey of more than 900 election officials earlier this year found that 40% of officials said they had increased physical security at election offices and polling places, nearly 40% also reported experiencing harassment, abuse or intimidation, and 70% of those surveyed believed intimidation had increased since 2020.
Claire Woodall Vogg, who served as executive director of the Milwaukee Board of Elections from 2020 until earlier this year, said the city spent more than $100,000 to beef up physical security at her office.
“It used to be that you had to walk up to the desk and reach out and shake hands, but now we have unbreakable glass and panic buttons and things like that,” said Woodall Vogg, now a senior adviser to the government watchdog group Issue One, which recently issued a pledge to help election officials address the threats they face.
She added that there would have been voters dissatisfied with elections before 2020, but these were often challenges to specific rules or laws.
“We’ve often had citizens who are frustrated or angry about the way the law is written, and once we explain to them, ‘We have to ask for photo ID, this is state law,’ that usually calms the situation,” she said.
Now, “you’re not opposing the law, you’re accusing us of not following the law without evidence, and when we try to present evidence, you just ignore it,” she said.
The Department of Justice has also set up a task force focused on election crimes, but it has been criticized for being slow and not proactive enough.
Woodall Vogg, who did not have any security during her public appearances, said being out in public meant striking a balance between being transparent about the election and speaking to a hostile public who refuses to believe the election was legitimate.
Barb Byrum, the county clerk in Ingham County, Michigan, who oversees elections in the county, said the Department of Homeland Security recently visited her office to conduct a security assessment at the site. She declined to go into details about what her office is doing to beef up security.
“I now have blinds in my office so people across the street can’t see me sitting at my desk,” she says. “It makes us all look over our shoulders a little bit.”