‘Get cancer’: how election lies morphed into a plague of hate in Arizona

On a typical day during the 2022 elections in Arizona, threatening emails and social media posts flowed into Maricopa county's inboxes.

Emailers, social media posters and callers were mad about everything from printer problems on election day to vote counting to court rulings, documents obtained by the Guardian show.

"Election stealing piece of shit - get cancer," one person wrote to a county elections official.

"You cheating sons of bitches every last one of you should swing for treason," a Twitter account wrote to the county.

"You deserve to be executed in front of America by Firing Squad," another wrote to the county supervisors.

Nearly all of the perpetrators of these threats believed that the election was stolen from the candidate they wanted to win. In 2022, the threats regularly mentioned the election being stolen from the Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who, despite her loss, has not conceded the race and is still fighting it in court.

These kinds of harassing and threatening messages have become the new normal for elections officials, especially those in swing states such as Arizona. Since Maricopa county became a frequent target in 2020 after Trump lost both it and the state, the county has worked to catalogue and respond to threats to protect its employees and try to hold the people making these threats accountable, creating one of the most robust threat monitoring and response systems in the nation. County officials hope the system will help them in 2024, when they anticipate a rise in threats.

After 2020, it seemed, more people felt empowered to threaten elections officials, egged on by politicians who continued to spread election lies, said Paul Penzone, the sheriff of Maricopa county.

The number of threats against Maricopa county elections officials increased in 2022 compared with 2020, though the county improved and perfected the way it catalogued threats, making a direct comparison difficult. In 2022, the county processed 386 threats - more than one a day. Penzone said that 2024 could be even worse.

"My concern is, with that empowerment now as we come into another presidential election, the populace who feel like that behavior is acceptable and appropriate, now they're enabled, now they're empowered and they feel like it is not only appropriate to do, but that it's their responsibility to act that way," Penzone said.

The detailed process and level of monitoring and response from Maricopa county is far more than in most other election jurisdictions. The county is one of the country's largest, and it's situated in the middle of near-constant election denialism in a state where the fervor over purported voting irregularities has not died down.

"You're talking about 9,000 jurisdictions across the country, 3,000 counties, and the vast majority just do not have the resources and the tools and the skill level to do the kinds of things that you see in Maricopa," said Neal Kelley, the chairman of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections and a former elections official in Orange county, California.

The threatening messages fall along common themes: they mention treason, saying the penalty for it is death, sometimes adding in the word or imagery of hanging. They say that "we the people" are watching officials' moves. They bring up jail or prison, bloodshed, violence, war or the second amendment. Some are blatantly homophobic, antisemitic, sexist.

Some willingly sign their names to their screeds, sometimes leaving their phone number or address, a sign that they don't believe there could be repercussions. Depending on the content of a message and directness of a threat, though, the county contacts law enforcement for further investigation and potential prosecution.

Over the past few years, in response to rising threats, Maricopa county has beefed up the way it monitors and responds to these kinds of messages.

When a direct or indirect threat comes in, anyone in the county can send an email to an internal email address to document the threat, which then creates a ticket that can be responded to, similar to how an employee would file a ticket if they needed computer help. From there, analysts look over the threat and decide whether it should be forwarded to law enforcement agencies in Arizona and at the federal level.

Whether law enforcement decides to investigate or, eventually, prosecute is out of county election officials' hands.

Some threats come directly to the county, via social media messages, emails or phone calls. But the county also proactively monitors certain corners of the internet where people toss around threats and plan responses, funneling those into the monitoring system as well.

The threats most frequently target the public officials who run elections, like the county supervisors and recorder, and top elected officials in the state, like the governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

But they also occasionally target lower-level employees whose roles rarely become fodder for the public's ire. Those employees sometimes end up in videos that ping around the internet or land in certain publications that are known to kick up more threats, such as the far-right Gateway Pundit. When that happens, those employees face ongoing harassment and threats, too.

If an employee becomes a target, the county works with them to improve their security and privacy online while providing any assistance they may need to cope with a barrage of hateful comments. In some cases, the county will add physical security for them as well, Penzone said.

Since the 2020 election saw the central count facility become a target of protesters, the county has added a permanent fence and limited access to the area. During the 2022 election, the Maricopa county sheriff's office had an increased presence at the site, adding a temporary fence around a broader part of the facility and putting more officers there to deter any mayhem. At one point, deputies rode by the area on horseback, probably as a show of force.

For people who answer the phones, the county trains them on how to handle difficult callers by attempting to defuse and de-escalate the situation. The training follows a "Triple A" strategy of apologizing, acknowledging and assuring callers. If a caller continues to harass, the employee should provide a warning about their inappropriate behavior and let them know they will hang up if it continues.

"You are not expected to be subjected to continued verbal abuse from callers," says a training document obtained by the Guardian.

If a person calls and makes threats, the county advises the employee to remain calm and try to gather as much information as possible, like the caller's name and target of their threat. Immediately after the call, the employee is directed to report the incident to a supervisor so it can be documented and responded to.

Those who assess the harassing and threatening messages and phone calls walk a fine line when considering what could be an actionable threat. They weigh people's free speech rights against safety.

"Oftentimes, people say some really offensive things that cause you to feel uneasy or feel that your life may be threatened, but by letter of the law, maybe their words aren't a direct threat," Penzone, the county sheriff, said. "And that's the frustrating part."

A few threats in Arizona have led to federal charges since 2020, like an Ohio man who was charged for sending threats to the secretary of state's office, an Iowa man who threatened to kill a county supervisor and a Missouri man who threatened the county recorder.

The Iowa man recently pleaded guilty. Clint Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors who was threatened, told the Washington Post he was glad a prosecution was "finally happening" when the charges were announced.

"The wheels of justice turn awfully slow, including when there's quite possibly actionable threats to not just me, but to my family, to our co-workers, my colleagues, the recorder, and election staff, people that are just trying to do a job," he said. "This has been going on a long time, and I know that there's hundreds, if not thousands, of election officials that have received calls like this."

Elections officials around the country have expressed frustration with a lack of prosecutions for these kinds of threats. In Maricopa county, Reuters reported, the county's information security officer wrote to the FBI asking for more help last year.

"Our staff is being intimidated and threatened," the IT officer wrote. "We're going to continue to find it more and more difficult to get the job done when no one wants to work for elections."

Arizona's Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said he is working with a Republican lawmaker to advance a bill that would make the addresses of both elections officials and elected officials private as a way to prevent harassment and threats.

When Kelley was in charge of elections in Orange county, California, he received veiled threats on occasion, which left him unnerved and searching for ways to make sure the threats didn't escalate.

"A lot of election officials who've experienced something have been frustrated because they report it, but then there's no action taken," he said.

Federal prosecutions have increased for election-related threats, and the justice department launched a taskforce aimed at the issue in 2021, but there's no data at the state level to show how local law enforcement has responded, Kelley said. And despite the increased prosecutions federally, "We're not seeing the kinds of numbers that would probably equate to what actually is happening out there with threats," he said.

Aside from prosecutions, elections officials can work to dispel disinformation and transparently explain to voters the various checks and balances that make election fraud rare, Kelley said. They should use their official channels to spread these messages and work toward creating systems to monitor threats, though that requires better funding.

And when politicians lose an election, they should concede and move on quickly, signaling to their followers to do the same, Kelley said. Several Arizona hopefuls still have not conceded their races, five months after the November 2022 election.

For Penzone's part, he's balancing making elections workers safe with not overpolicing polling sites, which could deter voters as well.

Since 2020, election protection has grown to be a bigger and more constant part of his office's duties.

"In a perfect world, I would tell you that if I had enough staff, I would create a division specifically for election-related crime and security," Penzone said.