SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Local election officials face a growing number of threats as the country approaches Election Day. Among the potential tactics are things many people didn't even consider just two years ago. NPR's Frank Langfitt attended training sessions for election officials in South Carolina last week. Here is some of what he learned.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Let's say you're a local election official, and the Trump administration claims there may be election fraud at your polling stations. Gary Restaino, a former Justice Department attorney, says this is what could happen next.
GARY RESTAINO: I mean, the nightmare scenario that we want to talk about is what if there was a search warrant executed a few days after the elections in which the seizure of materials and machines prevented the tabulation and counting and certification process from occurring?
LANGFITT: This may sound far fetched, but Restaino says it's not. Earlier this year, a Republican sheriff who was running for governor in California seized more than half a million 2025 election ballots. And in Fulton County, Georgia, the FBI seized hundreds of thousands of ballots from the 2020 election.
RESTAINO: The second Trump administration is vastly different from anything we saw on the first time. The norms and policies are changing. We never saw a Fulton County search warrant before in any administration. We've not seen threats of having federal armed agents at the polls before. This is all new.
LANGFITT: Restaino works with the Brennan Center for Justice. It's a nonpartisan institute that's frequently criticized the Trump administration's actions on voting. Last week, Restaino told scores of election officials here how to prepare if the Feds show up and take ballots and equipment. Some election officials told me they'd never imagined something like this.
JEANINE BOSTICK: Are you kidding me? (Laughter) Are you kidding me?
LANGFITT: Jeanine Bostick is the director of the Jasper County Board of Elections.
BOSTICK: What about the voter's vote? What happens to that? And we're going to have to explain to them. DOJ is not going to explain nothing to the voter. They're going to be looking at Jeanine face and want to know, where is my vote and why did I let them take it?
LANGFITT: Election officials here in South Carolina say, if they lose control of ballots and machines, it could undermine confidence in the election. Laura Booth directs elections and voter registration in Anderson County. She says a federal seizure could lead to chaos and lawsuits.
LAURA BOOTH: I'm sure that election would have to be redone. And then we're talking about resources, man hours, budgets blown out the window (laughter).
LANGFITT: Amy Sams oversees elections in Pickens County. She says a lot of election staff would probably just quit.
AMY SAMS: I would foresee a large number of immediate retirements if that were to occur.
LANGFITT: Booth and Sams are laughing not because they're amused, but because they're astonished that federal seizures are a potential risk. Now, election experts have confidence in the country's voting system and still think federal search warrants are unlikely, and a federal judge would have to approve them. But there are other threats. In another training session, The Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a nonprofit group, covered everything from how to handle a drone dropping election pamphlets over a polling station to confrontations with conspiracy-minded voters and online threats.
Trainer Tina Barton, who cochairs the group, has first hand experience with that. In 2020, she served as a Republican city clerk in Michigan. After a clerical error occurred, the Republican National Committee claimed 2,000 Republican ballots had been given to Democrats. Barton denied it, and the error was quickly corrected, but a man threatened her life.
TINA BARTON: He used his phone across state lines to do that and leave that voicemail and say that when I least expect it, that he would kill me and that I should have a knife in my throat.
LANGFITT: Investigators couldn't immediately identify the man, so Barton spent a lot of time looking over her shoulder. At one point, she mistook the meow of a neighbor's cat in her garage for someone who might be coming to harm her.
BARTON: I recognized in that moment this had impacted me at a much deeper level than what I realized, and I made an immediate phone call to the therapist and said, I need to talk to somebody about this.
LANGFITT: Which is one reason why Barton and a fellow trainer, who served as a counterinsurgency advisor in Afghanistan, also teach election officials psychological resilience in the face of threats. Barton says demand for all of this training is huge. She says the group already has 126 events scheduled across the country. That's nearly double the number from 2024.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Charleston, South Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUN B, ET AL. SONG, "STILL TRILL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
