Election Officials Nationwide Are Making Big Security Upgrades Ahead Of November

Last summer, a candidate for the New Mexico state House showed up on Nathan Jaramillo’s doorstep. Jaramillo, the Bureau of Elections administrator in Bernalillo County, said Peña had previously sent threatening emails to both himself and to others in the county. Jaramillo brushed it off, annoyed at the personal intrusion but unconcerned.

Five months later, Peña, a Trump supporter who lost his election and rejected the results, was arrested and charged with organizing a string of brazen drive-by shootings targeting public officials.

Jaramillo thought back to five months earlier, when the man had shown up at his doorstep.

The severity of the situation “really hit me,” Jaramillo told HuffPost. “In hindsight, it was a lot more scary.”

Now, Jaramillo’s office assigns ticket numbers to emails they receive, organizing them by sender and keeping tabs on the office’s responses, in the hopes of anticipating anyone who could escalate their complaints into something more serious.

But the incident with Peña — who has pleaded not guilty, and whose attorney did not respond to a request for comment — is just one scene representative of an increasingly tense era of American politics. Fueled by Trump’s lies about election theft, supporters of his have spent years threatening election workers and the democratic process — and acting upon those threats. Now, as the 2024 presidential campaign charges toward November, election offices are taking steps they’d never dreamed could be necessary.

Several election officials HuffPost spoke to laid out laundry lists of upgrades — everything from ballistic windows, doors and walls to new security cameras, electronic access badges and location trackers on ballot boxes. And as the Republican Party