ELEC-003 — Insufficient Protection for Election Workers and Officials¶

Issue Snapshot¶

Problem: Election personnel face uneven protection.
Repair: Pair state protections with HAVA funding.
Vehicle: State and federal acts (state, federal).

Institutional Anomaly¶

Election administration depends on permanent officials, temporary workers, contractors, and volunteers who perform legally indispensable and politically sensitive duties, yet protection against threats, violence, coercive intimidation, unlawful disclosure of personal information, retaliation, and targeted harassment remains fragmented, reactive, and uneven among jurisdictions.

The federal government should not become the primary administrator, supervisor, or operational protector of state election personnel. Protection should remain principally state and local, with federal support confined to a narrowly structured financial backstop and independently authorized federal criminal enforcement.

Manifestations of the Failure¶

Election workers, officials, and their families — Georgia, 2020–2022¶

After false allegations accused Fulton County election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss of manipulating ballots, both women and members of their family were subjected to sustained racist harassment and death threats. Freeman testified that the FBI advised her to leave her home through the presidential inauguration. Moss testified that people went to her grandmother’s home, attempted to push inside, and claimed that they intended to make a “citizen’s arrest.” Moss subsequently left election work. The episode demonstrates family targeting, forced displacement, career loss, and the inability of ordinary post hoc remedies to prevent severe personal and institutional damage. See U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, Final Report, ch. 2 (2022); fourth public hearing materials and testimony.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger likewise testified that his personal information was disseminated, his wife received sexualized threats, and intruders entered the home of his widowed daughter-in-law after he refused efforts to alter Georgia’s certified result. Similar testimony described armed or threatening demonstrations outside other officials’ homes. These examples show the same institutional failure at different levels of election administration: political disputes were transferred to officials’ homes and families. See the Select Committee Final Report and summary of fourth-hearing testimony.

Threats against bipartisan Arizona election officials — 2021–2025¶

Federal prosecutions have documented repeated threats against Arizona election officials of both parties. James W. Clark threatened to detonate an explosive device unless then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs resigned, searched for her home address and methods of killing her, and caused evacuation of portions of the state government complex and security sweeps of Hobbs’s home and vehicle. He was sentenced in March 2024 to 42 months’ imprisonment. Other prosecutions have involved threats against Maricopa County officials and later threats against officials in both Arizona and Colorado. These cases demonstrate that existing criminal law can punish provable true threats but often only after evacuation, fear, security expense, and operational disruption have already occurred. See The Guardian, March 12, 2024; Associated Press, May 29, 2025.

Election Day bomb threats and polling-place closures — 2024¶

On November 5, 2024, bomb threats were directed at polling locations in multiple battleground states. The FBI stated that many appeared to originate from Russian email domains and that none had been determined credible at the time. At least two Fulton County, Georgia polling locations were evacuated and closed temporarily; officials sought extended voting hours to compensate for the interruption. Later research identified at least 227 threats against polling places and tabulation centers and found evidence that extending hours may not have fully cured turnout suppression at affected DeKalb County precincts. This episode demonstrates that even noncredible threats can disrupt voting, divert law-enforcement resources, expose workers to risk, and produce harm that cannot necessarily be repaired after the fact. See Reuters, November 5, 2024; Sequoia Andrade & Philip B. Stark, Does Extending Polling Hours Compensate for Bomb Threats? Evidence from the 2024 Election in Georgia, USA (2025).

Workforce attrition and recruitment damage — nationwide¶

The harm is not limited to a few prominent prosecutions. In a 2024 Brennan Center survey of 928 local election officials, 38 percent reported threats, harassment, or abuse related to their work; 27 percent reported knowing one or two officials who had resigned because of safety concerns; and 20 percent stated that they were unlikely to remain through the 2026 midterms. These findings support the institutional inference that intimidation is degrading experience, recruitment, and continuity across election offices even when no single communication results in prosecution. See Brennan Center survey reporting, May 1, 2024.

Existing criminal enforcement is necessary but incomplete. Some dangerous conduct remains constitutionally protected, cannot be attributed or proved beyond a reasonable doubt, falls below the applicable criminal threshold, or causes operational damage before prosecution can occur.

Resulting Damage¶

Inadequate protection can remove experienced personnel, deter recruitment, distort official judgment, increase security costs, disrupt polling or counting facilities, weaken continuity of operations, and make lawful election administration depend on whether individual officials are willing to endure escalating personal danger.

Personal courage should not substitute for institutional protection.

Underlying Weakness¶

The protection system may lack one or more of the following:

uniform coverage of permanent and temporary election personnel;
protection for family or household members targeted because of election duties;
rapid threat reporting and risk assessment;
expedited protective orders and emergency security assistance;
address-confidentiality and anti-doxxing protections;
facility-security and continuity planning;
clear coordination among election administrators, law enforcement, prosecutors, and courts;
civil, criminal, and administrative remedies calibrated to distinct forms of misconduct;
financial capacity for small or resource-constrained jurisdictions; and
safeguards against politically selective protection or enforcement.

A federal remedy centered on discretionary executive supervision would create an additional institutional risk: the same funding or protection mechanism could be used to reward, punish, pressure, or influence state election administration.

Proposal Survey¶

Federal law already protects voting rights and criminalizes some intimidation, threats, and interference. Relevant models include the Voting Rights Act intimidation provision, federal threat statutes, and civil-rights enforcement authority. See 52 U.S.C. § 10307 and 18 U.S.C. § 875.

Election-administration funding also has an established vehicle: the Help America Vote Act of 2002 created federal support through the Election Assistance Commission while preserving state administration. See 52 U.S.C. chapter 209. ELEC-003 combines state protection statutes with a HAVA-style funding backstop rather than federal operational control.

Least-Complex Adequate Remedy¶

The least-complex adequate remedy is a coupled legislative package:

a model state Election Personnel Protection Act establishing the substantive, politically neutral protection regime; and
a narrowly drawn HAVA amendment offering automatic formula payments only to states maintaining that regime.

The state supplies legal protection and operational administration. The federal government supplies only a voluntary financial backstop, objective verification, protection-purpose accounting, and independently authorized criminal enforcement. Failure to participate results only in loss of the new grant.

This structure is less coercive and less susceptible to executive leverage than withholding existing election, justice, homeland-security, transportation, or other federal funds.

Repair and Prevention¶

State protection regime¶

Each state should enact a politically neutral election-personnel protection statute that:

protects permanent and temporary election officials, employees, poll workers, contractors, and volunteers when targeted because of election-related duties;
extends appropriate protection to family or household members targeted for the same reason;
applies without regard to party, candidate, viewpoint, ideology, election outcome, or the perceived political effect of an official act;
addresses threats, violence, coercive intimidation, unlawful doxxing, retaliation, and targeted harassment while preserving constitutionally protected speech;
establishes rapid reporting, threat assessment, and referral procedures;
authorizes expedited protective orders, emergency security, temporary relocation, and related support where justified;
protects residential and other sensitive personal information where constitutionally permissible;
requires facility-security and continuity-of-operations planning;
provides enforceable state remedies and institutional responsibility through existing state and local bodies; and
remains operative regardless of whether federal funding is available or accepted.

Limited federal support through HAVA¶

Congress should amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 by adding a self-contained Election Personnel Protection Payments program. The program should provide automatic, formula-based block grants only to states that enact and maintain a qualifying neutral protection statute containing the minimum protections expressly enumerated by Congress.

Enactment and maintenance of the qualifying state statute should be the sole substantive eligibility condition. Grant funds should remain restricted to election-personnel protection and operational continuity, with ordinary accounting, audit, and anti-fraud requirements.

The amendment should:

create a new and dedicated funding stream rather than threaten existing HAVA or unrelated federal funds;
require only state certification and a provision-by-provision statutory crosswalk, not a federally approved state plan;
make qualification automatic after objective verification of the enumerated statutory elements;
prohibit competitive awards, discretionary scoring, waivers, supplemental eligibility conditions, and federal evaluation of state election policies;
confine the Election Assistance Commission, or any other administrator, to ministerial payment, accounting, and misuse-review functions;
preserve exclusive state control over institutional placement, procedures, enforcement, and methods of compliance beyond the enumerated minimum protections;
prohibit federal consideration of voter eligibility, registration, voting methods, ballot custody, counting, canvassing, recounts, certification, elector appointment, election outcomes, or election disputes;
prohibit a state's ineligibility from affecting any other federal payment or assistance; and
provide expedited de novo judicial review of a denial identifying the specific missing statutory element.

Federal criminal jurisdiction should remain limited to independently defined federal offenses, including conduct with an appropriate federal or interstate nexus. It should not become a source of administrative control over state election processes.

Proposed Legislation¶

Relationship to Adjacent Proposals¶

ELEC-001 concerns federal executive interference with state and local election administration.
ELEC-002 concerns the legal resilience of canvassing and certification mechanisms.
ELEC-003 concerns the personal security and operational continuity of election personnel throughout the election process.
ELEC-007 concerns military, National Guard, or armed federal-force intervention in election administration.
ELEC-008 concerns broader accountability for efforts to overturn lawful election results.

A threat intended to compel a certification decision may implicate both ELEC-002 and ELEC-003. ELEC-002 owns the certification mechanism; ELEC-003 owns protection of the targeted person and continuity of election operations.

Budgetary Impact Statement¶

Budget authority is likely required; no dollar estimate is assigned pending source-backed cost data.

Note: Preliminary ARRP assessment only; not a CBO, OMB, agency, or legislative-counsel score.

Proposal Scoring¶

Proposal Quality Score: 77 / 100 (Review Ready)
Adoption Score: 5 / 12 (Limited Adoption Basis)
Adoption Friction: 58 / 100 (Significant Resistance)
Required Electoral Environment: state-level-pathway
Development Priority: active

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Internal Review Status: Internal project review complete; external validation pending
Last Internal Review: Internal project review
Scoring Standard: 2026-06-27.2; Scoring Basis: Current project standard
Next Review: Qualified election-law, criminal-law, workplace-safety, and election-administration review focused on threat coverage, enforcement, implementation, and federalism; then a targeted follow-up internal review
Full Review History: ELEC-003 review history

Annotation¶

Legislation crosswalk. The model state act should satisfy the federal HAVA eligibility structure through a provision-by-provision statutory crosswalk. The current draft maps federal minimum requirements to state-act sections covering protection of election personnel and covered family or household members; politically neutral administration; prompt reporting, threat assessment, referral, and coordination; emergency protective assistance; expedited protective relief; address confidentiality and data minimization; remedies for threats, coercion, retaliation, doxxing, false emergency reports, bomb threats, swatting, and comparable misconduct; continuity planning; workforce support; aggregate reporting; neutral application; and continued state-law operation regardless of federal funding.

The current model state draft also maps documented manifestations to remedy provisions. Freeman and Moss-style threats, family targeting, forced displacement, and career loss are addressed through reporting, family-inclusive assessment, emergency relocation, protective orders, address confidentiality, doxxing liability, threat offenses, counseling, leave, anti-retaliation, and retention support. Arizona-style threats, evacuation, and later prosecution are addressed through rapid assessment, preventive security, protective orders, threat liability, restitution, evacuation protocols, backup operations, and continuity planning. Election Day bomb threats and polling-place closures are addressed through aggravated liability, restitution, relocation, public notice, backup sites, staffing, records preservation, and lawful remedial procedures. Raffensperger-family-style doxxing, sexualized threats, and intrusion are addressed through family and household protections, suppression of exposed personal information, emergency residential security, and civil and criminal remedies for targeted disclosure and coercion. Workforce attrition is addressed through counseling, protected leave, replacement staffing, recruitment and retention assistance, aggregate measurement, and needs-based funding.

Constitutional Structure. Congress may encourage state action through clearly stated, related, and genuinely voluntary spending conditions. The proposal avoids commandeering by leaving states free to decline the new funds and avoids the principal coercion concern identified in NFIB v. Sebelius by placing no existing or unrelated funding at risk. See U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1; South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987); NFIB v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012); Murphy v. NCAA, 584 U.S. 453 (2018).

HAVA Placement. HAVA already provides a federal-state election-assistance architecture, including state certification and requirements payments. The proposed amendment should constitute a separate part rather than add election-personnel protection to the existing HAVA voting-system requirements or state-plan process. See 52 U.S.C. §§ 20921, 21001–21008, 21081–21085.

Neutrality. Political neutrality requires equal eligibility, procedures, benefits, enforcement standards, and remedies without regard to political affiliation, candidate preference, viewpoint, election-related position, or the political consequences of an official act. It does not prohibit risk-based distinctions grounded in credibility, imminence, severity, vulnerability, prior conduct, or operational impact.

First Amendment Qualification. The state regime must distinguish true threats, unlawful intimidation, retaliation, and actionable disclosure of protected information from constitutionally protected criticism, advocacy, protest, and rhetorical hyperbole. Criminal penalties should not be treated as the exclusive remedy because harmful conduct may remain protected, unattributable, unprovable, or below a criminal threshold.

Federalism Firewall. Federal eligibility review should be binary and statutory, not a general assessment of whether federal officials approve of a state's election-security program. No regulation, guidance, executive order, or grant term should be permitted to add substantive conditions beyond those enacted by Congress.

Source Note. The manifestations are illustrative rather than exhaustive. The examples were selected to show distinct institutional failures: individual and family targeting, forced displacement, prosecutable true threats, facility evacuation, Election Day operational disruption, and workforce attrition.

Quality Score. The 77/100 score reflects a Review Ready draft under scoring standard 2026-06-27.2. The internal project review confirmed the required issue architecture, state-primary remedy design, HAVA funding hook, issue-to-legislation alignment, budget-statement posture, official-law source coverage, Maryland state-law analogue, EOLDN functional legal-assistance analogue, and prosecution-limit source support. The score remains below publication-ready because primary records for every manifestation, representative state-law comparison, full federal prior-proposal research, source-backed fiscal analogues, election-administrator validation, and deeper First Amendment/doxxing analysis remain incomplete.

Adoption Score. The 5/12 score is limited. ELEC-003 has a plausible state-by-state model-law path, a federal grant-support vehicle, bipartisan institutional beneficiaries, and concrete recent manifestations, but the internal project review did not identify proposal-specific polling, sponsor coalitions, enacted model-state uptake, election-administrator endorsements, or bipartisan legislative records sufficient to award higher adoption credit.

Adoption Friction. The 58/100 score is Significant Resistance. The proposal protects election personnel of all parties and preserves state administration, which lowers friction, but it touches election administration, speech-adjacent threat and doxxing rules, appropriations, state-federal grant conditions, and security operations, each of which creates meaningful opposition, litigation, and implementation risk.

Required Electoral Environment. The required environment is state-level-pathway, with Pathway Viability state-by-state and Pathway Adjustment model-law-and-voluntary-federal-grant. The model state act can proceed state by state, while the federal HAVA amendment would require federal legislation and appropriations to create the voluntary funding backstop.

Development Priority. The priority is active because election-personnel threats, operational disruption, and workforce attrition remain live election-administration risks and the proposal has concrete vehicles for continued development.

Prior-Proposal and Existing-Law Fit. The internal project review confirms that the draft should remain coupled rather than solely federal. Existing federal threat and voting-rights statutes punish some conduct but do not create a complete personal-security, continuity, and workforce-support regime; reporting on the DOJ election-threats task force indicates that prosecution alone reaches only a subset of threats. Source leads show state-law movement, including Maryland's enacted 2024 Protecting Election Officials Act, and a functional legal-assistance analogue through the Election Official Legal Defense Network. A follow-up internal review should complete a direct Congress.gov and state-legislature survey.