Local Officials Carry Out Safe and Secure Election Amid High Levels of Hostility

Dec. 19, 2024

Analysis of Threat and Harassment Data for the 2024 Election

Last month, election officials and poll workers from communities across the United States came together to facilitate the 2024 election. Despite a series of hoax bomb scares and isolated disruptions at polling locations, years of preparation to ensure a safe and secure vote paid off. At the same time, analysis of new BDI data for November shows that election officials and poll workers were forced to carry out their duties in the face of a wave of targeted threats and harassment. This spike in election-related targeting comes amid a broader climate of hostility towards local public officials that is poised to continue beyond the post-election period, posing a persistent danger to democracy and civic space in 2025.

To measure the frequency and spread of threats and harassment against local officials in America, BDI maintains the Threats and Harassment Dataset (THD), an event-level dataset that is part of our larger mixed-methods Understanding Threats and Harassment Against Local Officials (UTH) research project. Updated monthly, the THD tracks incidents of hostility against a wide range of local officials, including election officials as well as elected leaders like mayors, judicial officials like county prosecutors, school officials like district superintendents, and more. From the start of data collection in January 2022 through November 2024, the THD has captured more than 1,400 unique events across nearly every state in the country.

Using updated data covering the full election period, this analysis maps key trends in election-related threats and harassment through the run-up to the vote and its immediate aftermath. It focuses on hostile activity targeting election officials, poll workers, election judges, and volunteers working in an official capacity to support the voting process. The findings provide a deeper understanding of the threat environment in which these civil servants carried out the 2024 election, and offer lessons for future election protection efforts going forward.

Read it here

THD events targeting election officials