A Michigan Election Worker Received Serious Threats in 2020. She’s Not Backing Down.

Tina Barton’s job does not keep her in one place for very long. In the next few months, she’ll be heading to South Carolina, New England, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Colorado. Every place Tina Barton lands, she’s doing the same thing: getting elections officials all in one room, with law enforcement, to create a plan for November. Barton is a former Michigan city clerk. After 2020, she felt like she needed to do more than simply count votes in one corner of the country.

The people she meets keep explaining the ways their jobs are starting to feel more and more dangerous. The election scenarios she plans for include things like threatening phone calls, an A.I.-generated robocall telling poll workers to stay home, and getting fentanyl in the mail. It may sound sensational, but it’s not far off from the voicemail Barton herself got right after President Joe Biden won the White House, when she was done counting votes. The message goes on for a minute and a half, filled with expletives and violence. “One voicemail can change your life forever,” Barton said.

On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke with Barton about how she’s preparing for 2024. After facing down her own threats, she’s not just preparing herself. She’s rushing around the country to prepare everyone else. A portion of our conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, has been transcribed below.

Mary Harris: Can you tell me why you became an election worker in the first place? You’ve said, “Elections were your true love.” Why?

Tina Barton: If you ask most election officials, they’ll tell you that they fell into it by chance. I spent a good part of my career—32 years in government—and it was really the last 16 of that that were geared towards elections. I’ve always been incredibly patriotic. I love this country so much. On our worst day, we’re still the best country in the entire world. And to me, this is one role that I can play that I know helps us continue to be that amazing country that we are and hopefully a beacon of light to the rest of the world.

You seemed to sense trouble coming, even before the 2020 election. When you wrote an op-ed for CNN, you quoted this 2019 speech you gave where you basically said, “People are doubting our work, and I’m worried about it.” When did you first become worried?

I would actually go back to 2016. I was a Michigan clerk at that time, and we were one of the states where Jill Stein filed for a recount. And that was the first time in my career where I’d ever seen something like that challenged on that scale. I could see this creeping in and people starting to doubt the process and to not believe it the way they had in the past.

You’re a Republican, right?

I am.

Did you see this doubt issue as a problem of one party more than another or just a generalized thing?

It’s come from all angles. We saw in Georgia that there was doubt cast on the outcome in 2018. And then you have 2020. I don’t think this is a partisan thing. This has become a mindset in our culture.

Take me back to Election Day 2020. Election Day itself, did you have a routine?

Your routine is you don’t sleep the night before, because you get home really late from getting all the prep work done. And then that morning, my alarm would usually go off around 3 or 3:30 in the morning to get to work no later than 5 a.m. And you’re in troubleshoot mode all day long. We’ve got an absentee county board that’s going through processing absentee ballots. We’re keeping our eye on 32 different precincts that have over 300 people working at them, making sure everything goes smoothly there. Answering any calls that might come, questions about Where am I supposed to vote? How am I supposed to vote? People that are doing same-day registration—I have a team that’s handling that. There are a lot of different moving parts on Election Day that you need to all run smoothly, and you’re pretty much watching the operation all day.

Eventually you realized there’d been some kind of mistake that had gotten through from your team. How’d you realize that?

At the end of election night, we’re sending results to our county, and it didn’t appear that the county had received one of our files where we had about seven to nine precincts on there. At about 1:30 in the morning, it was realized that the file name had been changed on the high-speed machine, and it should have been saved as an absentee file that was actually saved as a precinct file. And so we realized the error. We had to back it out, process all the ballots through again, and then save it correctly as an absentee file. It was discovered later—within 24 hours—that there were actually two files out there with the same votes on them, so they had to back out one of the files

So it could have been the votes were double counted.

Right. The precinct file was sent twice, basically, for the absentees.

Oh God. As the clerk, you must have been like, Oh no.

Clerks are type-A perfectionists, and all they want to do is do the job and do it right. And you put hours and hours and hours into processes, making sure that everything goes perfectly. And sometimes it doesn’t. Again, we were able to correct it within hours of discovering it, fix the problem. It’s Thursday afternoon at this point, and everything is taken care of. There’s a canvasing period after Election Day that allows for mistakes to be corrected.

It’s interesting because you anticipate that there are going to be mistakes. We’re going to need this grace period.

We’re dealing with humans, right? When you’re dealing with humans, things are going to happen. There are going to be mistakes made. That’s what the canvasing period is. There is a time period in law that allows it to be fixed and corrected before it’s certified.

How did the rest of the world find out about this error? I know that you said the Detroit News was there, but then Ronna McDaniel from the Republican National Committee, she put you on blast, right?

Yeah. So the Friday after that election, a press conference was held at the Oakland County Republican Party headquarters, which was the Republican headquarters for the group that nominated me to be their candidate for Oakland County clerk. So it was filled with individuals who probably had voted for me, maybe had contributed to my campaign, had my signs in their yard. And she makes a statement, saying that they had “found 2,000 Republican ballots that had been given to Democrats due to a clerical error in Rochester Hills.”

You can hear people gasp. She never says my name, but they know. They know where I am the city clerk at that time. They know my name. They know who I am, where I work. So, it was true shock in that moment for them to have that being said about me. Nobody ever contacted me from the county party to say, “Can you explain what happened here?” There was no desire to reach out to me and find out what had happened. Members of the president’s staff also started tweeting about me after that event.

President Trump’s staff?

Correct.

Using your name?

Yes.

That must’ve scared you.

It’s surreal, right? I’m a city clerk in a community of 75,000. I’m highly respected in my state amongst other clerks and even known across the country for my election contributions. To have that happen was absolutely devastating to me personally and also professionally, to feel that my community might have thought that I let them down, or that I did something wrong. I had to correct the record because I wanted my community to know that you can feel confident in the way the election was handled and how the ballots were processed.

You posted your own video, right?

I did. I recorded a video. I put the video out on Twitter, and within 72 hours, I had 1.2 million views of the video.

Were you going viral in a good way?

The positive side for me is always: Did the public get the truth? And the public got the truth from me about what happened. The downside to that is it caused me to be put in a national spotlight even more.

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A couple days after that press conference where Ronna McDaniel talked about what had happened in your clerk’s office, you came into work and you checked your voicemail. And you heard that tape of a guy threatening you and your family. Can you take me back to that moment when you first heard it? 

Walking into the office, one of the first things I would always do is fire up the computer, getting ready to check emails. And then I’ll look at the phone to see if the light’s flashing, if I had voicemails. And so I sit down on that Tuesday morning to check my voicemails because the light was flashing, and this voicemail from Andrew Nichols was on my voicemail there in the office saying horrible things, calling me horrible names, threatening me and my family.

Did you recognize the voice?

No, I didn’t know who it was. Frankly, I didn’t know who it was for three years. So, it was three years of living with not knowing who put that voicemail on my phone, whether it was somebody local, whether it was somebody who I passed in the grocery store or somebody who knew me from something. Again, I had ran for office, so I had visibility as far as my face goes. Is it somebody who’s intentionally going to seek me out? All these questions run through your mind in that moment. Does this person intend to make good on this? And can I ever really relax because they say, “When you least expect it”?

You said you didn’t know this person’s identity until three years later. Andrew Nichols, the man who we now know left this voicemail, he pleaded guilty to doing it. He’s going to be sentenced in July.

July 9.

Are you going to be at Andrew Nichols’ sentencing?

Oh, absolutely. I’m working on my victim impact statement now.

What do you want him to know?

I certainly want him—and the judge and everybody in that room—to know that his decision to make that call on that day and say those words might have been a moment in time for him, but it’s a moment of a lifetime for me. There’s a mental part of this for a victim that they never get to walk away from. But what I would like to say, too, is that while I live in a state of hypervigilance, his threat to me did not cause me to back down. If anything, it fueled a fire in me to make sure that anybody who finds their self in the position that I was in feels that they have the ability to respond, that they are resilient enough to deal with it. All it’s done is make me better at what I do. So, I win in this. And every election official in this country wins.