US election officials face ‘new era’ of violent threats, taskforce chief warns

Election officials across the US are facing an onslaught of unfounded hostility for “dutifully and reliably doing their jobs”, the head of a federal taskforce set up to protect the election community from violent threats said on Monday.

John Keller, who leads the day-to-day efforts of the election threats taskforce, based in Washington, told reporters that the wave of violent threats – unleashed by Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen – amounted to an attack “on the very foundation of our democracy – our elections”.

He said that the US had entered a “new era” in which the election community “is scapegoated, targeted and attacked”.

On Monday, the taskforce, founded in June 2021, secured its 10th sentence of a perpetrator of violent threats against an election official.

Speaking in Phoenix, Arizona, after the sentencing, Keller said robust public scrutiny of government authority and officials was “desirable and necessary”. But he added: “Death threats are not debate; death threats are not first-amendment protected speech. Death threats are condemnable criminal acts that will be met with the full force of the Department of Justice.”

Monday’s sentencing at a federal district court in Phoenix saw Joshua Russell of Bucyrus, Ohio, given 30 months in prison. He had pleaded guilty to one count of making a threatening communication across state lines.

According to court documents, between August and November 2022 Russell recorded three threatening voicemails on the phone of Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic governor of Arizona. At the time she was Arizona’s secretary of state, its top election administrator.

In his voicemails, Russell accused Hobbs of committing election fraud in Trump’s defeat in the