How a cop-turned-therapist is helping election workers deal with threats and harassment

Every few weeks, a group of active-duty and retired cops gather with election officials to plan for harrowing scenarios on Election Day.

What if someone shows up near a polling place with an assault rifle? Or uses artificial intelligence to mimic a county clerk's voice and call in a bomb threat?

The sessions, which are held around the country, can trigger intense emotions for current and former election officials, some of whom have experienced harassment or death threats that have taken a toll on their mental health.

At the end of the sessions, Harold Love, a retired Michigan state trooper-turned-therapist, stands up and addresses the group.

"I talk with them about how it's normal for them to feel this way," Love told CNN. "You start seeing heads nod. When you see that other people are feeling the same thing or similar things, now it's like, 'OK, I'm not losing my mind.'"

Four years ago, these sessions weren't necessary. Few in law enforcement or the election community anticipated the surge in violent threats — often based on false voter-fraud conspiracy theories propagated by former President Donald Trump and his allies — directed at election workers during the 2020 election.

The Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE), which hosts the security drills where Love speaks, was formed in 2022. It filled a void: Law enforcement and election officials needed a space to cope with a new reality in the United States, where once-unknown election workers can be the target of public vitriol.

Four years after the 2020 election, the threat level hasn't come down and hostile rhetoric toward election workers is commonplace.

According to a survey released in May by the Brennan Center for Justice, 38 percent of local election officials have experienced "threats, abuse or harassment for doing their jobs." Many have left the profession and have been replaced with less experienced election workers.

US officials are concerned that a belief in voter fraud or other "election-related grievances" could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence in the weeks before and after the November election, as it did during the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to a recent federal intelligence bulletin obtained by CNN.

Federal officials have conducted numerous security assessments of polling sites and other election infrastructure in the last year. Federal and election officials are on edge and are trying to take every security precaution to prevent a violent attack on election workers.

Election officials in battleground states aren't taking anything for granted. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes knows firsthand the turmoil that false claims of voter fraud can cause. Fontes was a top election official in Maricopa County, Arizona's largest, in 2020 when an armed mob showed up after Election Day.

"We have to be prepared to respond to the acts of domestic terrorists — their threats, any real violence that they decide to engage in," Fontes told CNN.

He said Arizona election workers are ready: "We're a hearty bunch."

'We're seeing people walk away' Love, the ex-state trooper, began speaking to election officials as a therapist after his friend Tina Barton, a former Republican clerk in the City of Rochester Hills, Michigan, received a death threat in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

As a clerk, Barton called out as false an assertion that Ronna McDaniel, then-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, made at a press conference, claiming that 2,000 ballots in Rochester Hills had been "given" to Democrats.

Days later, a man from Indiana left a voicemail for Barton. "F — your family, f — your life, and you deserve a f — ng throat to the knife," the man said, according to prosecutors. He was later sentenced to 14 months in prison

Now, as a private election security consultant, Barton told CNN she uses her experience to relate to election officials who are under duress.

"We're seeing people walk away from this amazing profession that they actually love," said Barton, who co-founded CSSE and has attended its security drills. The threats, harassment and other pressures have led some election officials, or their family members, to say, "'Enough is enough. We don't want you to live in this state of mind,'" Barton said.

The Justice Department has secured more than a dozen convictions in connection with threats made to election officials, but those prosecutions have been too few and far between for many election officials and their advocates.

Election officials who have stayed in the job despite the threats are drawing on their traumatic experiences in 2020.

When Al Schmidt was Philadelphia commissioner during the 2020 election, he said he didn't know to which law enforcement agency he should report violent threats.

The threats became more specific, and aimed at Schmidt's children, after Trump mentioned him by name in a tweet days after the 2020 election, according to Schmidt's testimony to the House select committee that investigated January 6.

Four years later, Schmidt is Pennsylvania's secretary of state, where he oversees election administration across the state. He also leads the state's Election Threats Task Force, which includes state and federal law enforcement and is designed to detect threats to election workers more quickly.

"It would be naïve to not prepare for the possibility of that reoccurring," Schmidt said of the threats that he and other election workers received in 2020.