Threats to Election Workers: Measuring and Mitigating this Anti-democratic Behavior
More than one in three local election officials in the U.S. experienced threats, harassment or abuse for doing their jobs. This is the stark finding in the Brennan Center’s 2024 Local Election Officials Survey. Of those threatened, more than 3 in 5 have been threatened in person.
Against this backdrop, and with a politically charged U.S. election approaching, Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) has released two important papers, one that analyzes online hate and harassment networks targeting election officials and one that recommends how online platforms can ensure they are not contributing to potential political violence, including against election workers.
C4D co-director Damon McCoy is a co-author of a new paper, “Cyber democracy in the digital age: Characterizing hate networks in the 2022 US midterm elections”, in which he and co-authors used an innovative research approach that not only allowed them to analyze a far larger data set than previous research but also offered detailed insights into the actors and dynamics of online harassment in electoral contexts. Their research integrates comprehensive real-world data with techniques such as entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and community extraction to offer an exhaustive characterization of hate speech directed toward chief election officials during the 2022 US midterm elections.
To the best of our knowledge, it is the first large-scale data pipeline and quantitative study of US election official harassment. In addition to shedding light on these campaigns, it demonstrates that it is absolutely possible to detect this conduct and the individuals or groups who perpetrate it in real-time. The data pipeline methodology developed by McCoy and his co-authors could be used by online platforms to better enforce their own rules and by third-party monitors, regulators, and other parties for content review, measurement, and potential policy development, all of which are needed to better help keep election workers safe from threats that often start online, but as we have seen in recent years, can spill over into threats offline.
C4D’s Senior Policy Fellow Yael Eisenstat in March convened a working group of experts on social media, election integrity, extremism, and political violence, to discuss the relationship between online platforms and election-related political violence. Along with co-authors Daniel Kreiss of UNC Chapel Hill and Justin Hendrix of Tech Policy Press, they released a policy paper that provides realistic and effective recommendations to platforms on steps they can take to ensure their products do not contribute to the potential for political violence, particularly in the lead-up and aftermath of the U.S. general election in November. How to keep election workers safe is one of the multiple political threats the paper addresses.
While perpetrators of violence are responsible for their own actions, online platforms are tools for distributing messages and narratives intended to incite political violence, and for recruiting and organizing groups that may carry out violent acts.
McCoy’s research bears this out, through analysis of close to 600,000 tweets during the 2022 U.S. midterm election season. Election officials in key battleground states, such as Arizona and Michigan, received copious amounts of harassing messages, with Arizona's chief election officer Katie Hobbs receiving the brunt of the harassment. Over 30 percent of all tweets directed at her, along with commentators on her posts, fell into the "most aggressive" category of attacks. In fact, almost ninety percent of all collected tweets in this study targeted Arizona, which had by far the highest volume of toxic language directed at its top election official, who was also running for governor.
These threats have real-world consequences. While political speech is constitutionally protected, the researchers warn that abuse and intimidation of election workers could have a chilling effect, deterring qualified professionals from overseeing voting and eroding public trust. In fact, to prepare for the 2024 election, the Arizona Secretary of State’s office “is coordinating active-shooter drills for election workers and has sent kits to county election offices that include tourniquets to stem bleeding, devices to barricade doors and hammers to break glass windows.”
Online platforms can, and must, do more to protect these election workers. Washington Post reporter Will Oremus pointed out in his coverage of the policy paper: “While other recent reports have focused on holding tech firms accountable for “backsliding” on content moderation in recent years, this one is forward-looking.” One of the key recommendations from the policy paper focuses on this specifically, advising platforms to:
- “Develop clear policies for threats against election administrators, judges, and other public actors. There has been a substantial rise in violent threats against public officials, including through doxing and mobilization of harassment toward specific election officials and agencies. Threats against those who work to protect and administer elections should be treated as forms of violence and enforced accordingly. These should have a particularly low bar for enforcement.”
McCoy also points out that "many of the harassing messages made connections to the 2020 presidential election and baseless conspiracy theories about electoral fraud." And yet, YouTube, Meta, and then-Twitter (now X) have all reversed policies regarding the 2020 election lies.
This is why one of the policy paper’s recommendations focuses on 2020 election denialism:
- “ALL lies about elections should be covered, including lies about the 2020 U.S. election; companies should not pick and choose which elections merit enforcement.”
As Eisenstat wrote in that paper: “We already see rhetoric about the 2020 election being used to foment anger, and lies about those results will surely be used to prime those who believe the 2020 election was “stolen” to act if the 2024 results do not go their way. Election deniers will continue to build networks and audiences for groups and pages that will eventually convert their 2020 claims to target 2024.”
Read together, these two papers make it clear that online platforms are not only conduits for threats against the very people who carry out one of democracy’s most essential tasks–the free and fair administration of elections–but that they can do more to help protect that process and these people. There is still time for companies to implement the fuller set of recommendations to help mitigate election-related violence in this U.S. election cycle, with lessons that can apply globally. "If we want to safeguard democracy, we must find ways to protect those ensuring fair elections from harassment and threats, both online and off," said McCoy.