Feature Bill Gates, an Arizona election official and former Maricopa County supervisor, says that the death threats started shortly after the 2020 presidential election.

“That’s when we became pariahs within the Republican Party because we were not willing to sign on to this whole election-being-stolen narrative,” Gates, a life-long Republican, told The Register, describing the online and real-life harassment and violence he and other supervisors faced.

A few months later, on January 6, 2021, as armed rioters stormed the US Capitol building, “was the first time that we were instructed by the sheriff to leave the house,” Gates remembered. “We had been doxxed at the point.”

So Gates and his family spent two nights in hiding.

This happened again on election night in 2022, when law enforcement again told Gates he would be safer if he spent the night in an undisclosed location. The midterm elections in Arizona that year saw an especially contentious gubernatorial race between Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who oversaw the 2020 election, and Kari Lake, a former TV anchor and strident 2020 election denier. Hobbs narrowly won the seat.

I’m going to poison your food

Gates and fellow supervisors were still tabulating votes when he received an email. “It said, ‘Bill, I’m here locally, I know how to access people who prepare your food and I’m going to poison your food’,” he said. Last January, the man who sent the threatening email messages to Gates was sentenced to three years’ probation.

Between 2020 and 2024, “it was just a constant drumbeat” of threats and harassments targeting his colleagues and him, Gates remembers. After suffering from PTSD, he vacated his supervisorial seat in 2024 to lead a new Arizona State University program, Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, or MODL (pronounced “model”).

Knowing the CISA had our back gave us a great feeling of support and confidence – we felt like the federal government was our partner. And I’m very concerned that that’s not what we’re going to be looking at in 2026

“I’m no longer in office, but I’m still in this world and I see election officials all the time,” he said. “Certainly the level of threats and intimidation has gone down. The question is whether we’ve now left that in our rear view mirror – or will it just come back with the 2026 election?”

He’s also worried that this time around, some election offices won’t have the federal resources from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to combat threats to both physical and digital security.

Given CISA’s rapidly shrinking headcount and budget under the second Trump administration, Gates fears local election officials could lose “the cyber protection that CISA is known for and that they provide, but then also the more hands-on support in the analog world that they provide.”

“Local elections officials have so much going on,” Gates continued. “We ask them to be experts in election law, experts in procurement, and HR. So to expect them to be experts as well in both cyber and physical security? It’s just too much. Knowing the CISA as well as the FBI had our back gave us a great feeling of support and confidence – we felt like the federal government was our partner. And I’m very concerned that that’s not what we’re going to be looking at in 2026.”

Gates has dire advice for all of these election workers and volunteers. “I hate to say this, but it is incumbent upon local election officials to assume we don’t have that partnership and act accordingly. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”

61% concerned CISA cuts will hurt election security

He isn’t the only one worried about what the midterm elections will look like.

The Brennan Center, a law and public policy think tank, surveyed 858 election officials this spring, and most said that they’re either very (36 percent) or somewhat (24 percent) concerned about federal cuts to election security programs.

Additionally, 61 percent of local election officials are specifically concerned about cuts to CISA and their impact on election security. 80 percent said CISA should provide more support or the same amount of support as it did in the 2024 election cycle. 76 percent said that they need their budgets to grow to keep up with administration and security costs.

And 38 percent of the Brennan Center’s survey respondents said that they had been harassed, abused, or threatened for doing their jobs.

“Resource constraints are very real in elections,” Natalie Adona, registrar of voters in California’s Marin County, told The Register. “We have relied on partners like CISA to provide us with low or no-cost tools to be able to prepare our elections offices and protect the election system from bad actors.”

Adona, who before moving to Marin served as the county clerk/recorder/registrar of voters in California’s Nevada County, witnessed “in real time” how important CISA funding was to protect election offices and their workers from both cyber and real-life intruders.

Someone sat outside my house and waited for me to come out. I was having panic attacks

Trump supporters who bought into the president’s Big Lie about winning the 2020 presidential election targeted Adona and her office following the vote and again during the 2022 midterms. Also during this time, protestors who refused to follow the Nevada County elections’ mask mandate stormed the office and verbally abused the workers prompting the court to issue a restraining order to protect Adona.

“I’m part of the statistical group that reported being threatened, and being harassed or abused as a result of my being at my position,” she said.

“There was a period in time where I felt like I could not safely go down the hall without looking both ways and wondering where people were going to be,” she said. “There was an incident where someone sat outside my house in their car and waited for me to come out. I was having panic attacks.”

In addition to the physical threats, Adona also worries about false information spreading on social media – along with 81 percent of her colleagues, according to the Brennan Center.

Who are you gonna call?

“There is a ton of false information circulating online about the election process,” she said. “And now with artificial intelligence, and it being able to amplify false information, it’s a really a serious concern for people in my position. It is very hard to unring a bell.”

Plus, with the mass exodus happening at CISA and regional office directors leaving, along with the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) shut down and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center’s (MS-ISAC) budget being slashed, Adona says she doesn’t even know who to call for election security help.

“I no longer know who is on the CISA team that could help us,” she said.

Before the cuts started, Adona said she had a good relationship with the CISA regional team. They attended local elections conferences, they performed physical security assessments of the voting facilities, and they partnered with Nevada County on tabletop exercises to help prepare for hypothetical emergencies.

“And now, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do that,” she said. “I mean, I can’t plan around stuff that isn’t predictable.”

‘The individual who threatened me got out of prison in June’

Tina Barton, a senior election expert with The Elections Group, an organization that advises election officials, and former city clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, said that when she started her elections career three decades ago, she never would have thought that a city clerk would be on the receiving end of death threats.

And yet, “the individual who threatened me got out of prison in June,” she told The Register.

“Clerks have historically had a really wonderful working relationship with their constituents,” Barton said. “We often would call ourselves Google for government, because when someone had a question about anything to do with government, they would come to us. They knew us. They trusted us. They wanted to get information quickly. They knew we would help them out. The clerk’s office was always like the Miss Congeniality of government, and so to have that thought process flip on us was really unexpected and unnerving.”

Despite that shift, which Barton and everyone agrees occurred during the 2020 election cycle, there were no major issues in 2024. Barton credits that to strong partnerships between CISA, law enforcement, and local elections offices.

“There’s this collaborative planning effort that did not exist five years ago,” she said. “The majority of Americans would say 2024 was a very quiet election. But for election officials, over the last 12 to 18 months, we had things like fentanyl being sent in the mail, we had people being swatted at their homes, we had ballot drop boxes exploding.”

A community of 10,000 in Michigan can’t fight a Russia, or an Iran, on a cyber attack

The difference from five years ago: “We were table topping every single thing you can possibly think of, so if it does happen, we have a plan for that,” Barton said. “So the week of the election, when we saw over 200 bomb threats be called in or emailed in across the country, election officials were prepared. You didn’t see the chaos erupt that the bad actors were hoping for, because we already had plans for operation.”

Like many of her peers, Barton worries what will happen to election security in light of cuts to CISA, and how elections offices across all 50 states will rapidly share threat information now that the EI-ISAC is no more.

“Where are we going to get this information, and how are states going to communicate if they see a cyber issue happening out in Oregon, how are they going to let Michigan know that that’s happening where that was being done through CISA and also through the EI-ISAC?” she said.

“A community of 10,000 in Michigan can’t fight a Russia, or an Iran, on a cyber attack on their own,” Barton continued. “Having CISA be this overarching umbrella agency providing protection for all of us, letting us know when they’re seeing something pop up in one part of the country, and being able to alert people in the rest of the country helped us be able to put people on guard.”

Now that the federal support is no longer guaranteed, organizations such as The Elections Group and the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which Barton co-chairs, are looking to fill that gap. The committee works with election administrators, poll workers and volunteers, and law enforcement to prevent and respond to threats. The goal, according to Barton, is “to make sure that our democracy is not undermined by bad information and bad actors.”

“This next election cycle, 2026, is already unfolding right now, many states are seeing their candidates out campaigning in full force,” Barton said. “Election officials are already in an election cycle for an election that doesn’t take place until next year.” ®