Barton Gellman writes:

Now and then, not often, Deidre Henderson will still work up the nerve to drive herself to the market for milk or bread. She will sit in the parking lot in her big S.U.V., engine running, doors locked, ruminating on risk. Generally, she heads home without getting out of the car.

Henderson, who is fifty-two years old, is the lieutenant governor of Utah, a Republican midway through her second term. That makes her the state’s chief election officer. (Elsewhere, the responsibility most commonly falls to a secretary of state.) It also makes her a target. Along with her counterparts in dozens of other states, Henderson has refused to allow the Trump Administration to obtain state voter rolls and to oversee the removal of voters it deems unqualified, in advance of the midterms, on November 3rd. For that resistance, election conspiracists have deluged her with threats of sexual violence and murder.

“It’s scary,” she told me late this summer. “It’s horrible. Honestly, I’ve had to have counselling just to function, to deal with the burden of fear that comes from the threats I’ve been getting.”

Many of the messages, however disturbing, are protected speech under the First Amendment. Some, though, have been treated by law enforcement as posing a credible danger to Henderson’s life or safety. In Utah, a lieutenant governor does not routinely get a security detail. But in Henderson’s first term, when she opposed Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, she received threats that were so intense and specific that the Department of Public Safety placed her under protection for more than two years. The protection resumed before the 2024 election for a period. Henderson said that at times she has hired other protection. (The D.P.S. declined to comment on Henderson’s security detail.)

It was not always this unnerving to be an election official. But persistent lies about voter fraud, a centerpiece of Trump’s political narrative, have set loose torrents of hostility toward the men and women who oversee balloting nationwide. There are more than ten thousand voting jurisdictions in the United States, ranging from townships to states. In a national survey of local election officials this year, a third of them reported that they had personally been subjected to threats, harassment, or abuse because of their work. Half said they feared for the safety of their colleagues. [Continue reading…]