Election Workers in the Crosshairs
Speaker A: Hey, everyone, quick heads up.
Speaker A: There is some offensive language in this episode.
Speaker A: So, Tina, tell me how many frequent flyer miles you’ve racked up this year.
Speaker B: Well, I admittedly have used them.
Speaker B: Some of them.
Speaker B: We just took the whole family to Disney, but well over a few hundred thousand.
Speaker A: Tina Barton’s job does not keep her in one place for very long.
Speaker A: Tick off some of the places you’re going to go in the next month or two.
Speaker B: So we are headed to South Carolina.
Speaker B: We are headed to the New England states.
Speaker B: Colorado.
Speaker B: We’re headed out to Colorado, Wyoming, Wisconsin.
Speaker A: Everywhere Tina lands, she is doing the same thing, getting elections officials in one room with law enforcement to create some kind of plan for November.
Speaker A: Tina is a former Michigan city clerk.
Speaker A: After 2020, she felt like she needed to do more than simply count votes in one corner of the country.
Speaker B: Like today, we were here in the Kansas City area.
Speaker B: We had multiple federal partners in the room.
Speaker B: We had DHS in the room.
Speaker B: We had FBI election crime coordinators, FBI analysts in the room.
Speaker A: So interesting.
Speaker A: I just wonder, you spent years as a city clerk.
Speaker A: Were you ever meeting with, like, DHS and the FBI and the fire department all together in a room to plan for an election?
Speaker B: I had no idea that the FBI election crime coordinator position even existed.
Speaker B: I didn’t know what it was.
Speaker B: And actually, we asked in the room today, in a room full of law enforcement, you know how many of you know who your FBI election crime coordinator is?
Speaker B: Or did you know that that position existed?
Speaker B: Only a few hands went up.
Speaker A: Tina wants to eliminate these kinds of blind spots because the people she meets keep explaining the ways their jobs are starting to feel more and more dangerous.
Speaker A: I read about some of the election scenarios you dream up or plan for in your sessions, and they sound kind of wild to me, like everything from threatening phone calls to an AI generated robocall sent to poll workers telling them to stay home.
Speaker A: Fentanyl in the mail.
Speaker B: But are they really sensational?
Speaker B: Because actually there are things that are already happening right now across the country.
Speaker B: So in my mind, none of this is sensational.
Speaker A: At some point in your meetings, you play the voicemails you got, right?
Speaker B: Correct.
Speaker B: Saved message.
Speaker B: Tuesday, 711 pm.
Speaker C: Hi, Tina Barton.
Speaker C: This is p***** off Patriots of America.
Speaker C: 72 plus million of us.
Speaker C: Actually, even more than that, we’re watching.
Speaker A: This is a message Tina got right after President Biden won the White House when she was done counting votes, and.
Speaker C: You frauded out America of a real election where Donald Trump blew your f****** lying a** out of the water.
Speaker C: Guess what?
Speaker C: You’re gonna pay for it.
Speaker C: You will pay for it.
Speaker A: This message goes on for a minute and a half.
Speaker A: It’s filled with expletives and violence, even.
Speaker B: For election officials in the room.
Speaker B: You know, there’s always this, like.
Speaker B: There’s, like, gasping or there’s, like, tears in their eyes because some of them have heard some of this same type of language used on them.
Speaker A: But Tina wants the rest of us to hear this to understand what people like her are really facing.
Speaker C: Watch your f****** back, you f****** silly b****.
Speaker C: Watch your f****** back.
Speaker C: End of message.
Speaker B: One voicemail can change your life forever.
Speaker A: Does it bother you to hear this voicemail again and again?
Speaker B: You know, I’ve heard it probably literally hundreds of times, and I can hear it one time and be okay with it, and I can play it another time and get really choked up about it.
Speaker A: Today on the show, an elections worker prepares for 2024.
Speaker A: After facing down her own threats, she’s not just preparing herself, she’s rushing around the country to prepare everyone else.
Speaker A: I’m Mary Harris.
Speaker A: You’re listening to what next.
Speaker A: Stick around.
Speaker A: Can you tell me why you became an election worker in the first place?
Speaker A: Like you’ve said, elections were your true love.
Speaker A: Why?
Speaker B: Yeah, it’s interesting because I think if you ask most election officials or people who work in elections, they’ll tell you that they fell into it by chance.
Speaker B: I mean, I don’t know anybody who was like, when I grow up, I want to be the city clerk or I want to be the county clerk.
Speaker B: You know, I spent, you know, a good part of my career, 32 years in government, and it was really the last 16 of that, that were geared towards elections.
Speaker B: And we had a new elected township clerk.
Speaker B: I was an ordinance officer in our community, so I knew all of our ordinances.
Speaker B: I knew members of the community.
Speaker B: And she said, I need a deputy clerk, and I want you to do it.
Speaker B: And so I told her, I don’t really know what I’m bringing to the table for you.
Speaker B: And she said, we’re smart women, Tina.
Speaker B: We will figure it out.
Speaker B: And we did.
Speaker B: And I’ve always been incredibly patriotic, and I love this country so much.
Speaker B: I think on our worst day, we’re still the best country in the entire world.
Speaker B: 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.
Speaker A: Did you just love the participation, the fact that people were coming in to vote and, like, being civic minded?
Speaker B: Yeah, I love people.
Speaker B: I do yeah, the civic mindedness of it.
Speaker B: I love the election workers.
Speaker B: They are so committed.
Speaker B: And the average age of an election worker in Michigan is 74.
Speaker B: You know, it’s amazing.
Speaker B: And they, too, are incredibly patriotic and want to be part of the process.
Speaker B: And it’s something that’s generated generational, where you’ll have people come in and they’ll say, my mom was an election worker, but she can’t do it anymore.
Speaker B: So I feel like I should do it.
Speaker B: And it’s this way that I can give back to my country, the constituents, and just really, like, feel good about the service of it.
Speaker A: You seem to sense trouble coming even before the 2020 election.
Speaker A: Like 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.
Speaker A: When did you first become worried?
Speaker B: I would actually probably go back to 2016 again?
Speaker B: I was a Michigan clerk at that time, and we were one of the states that Jill Stein filed a recount for, the state challenging the presidential election results.
Speaker B: And that was the first time in my career where I’d ever seen something like that challenged on that scale.
Speaker A: Huh.
Speaker B: But I could just see this, like, creeping in and people starting to doubt the process and to not believe it the way that, like, they had in the past.
Speaker B: I kept seeing this.
Speaker B: I was looking at polls and surveys coming through.
Speaker B: And so, yeah, in January 2019, I gave a speech on doubt and the proof.
Speaker B: The only way that we could dispel doubt was to provide proof and, you know, calling on us to be even more transparent than we already are.
Speaker A: You’re a Republican, right?
Speaker B: I am.
Speaker A: Did you see this doubt issue as a problem of one party more than another or just a generalized thing?
Speaker B: You know, I think that it’s really.
Speaker B: It’s come from all angles.
Speaker B: We saw in Georgia that there was doubt cast on the outcome in 2018, and then you have 2020.
Speaker B: And so I think we’ve seen it from multiple angles, from different parties.
Speaker B: I don’t think this is a partisan thing.
Speaker B: I think that this has become just really a mindset in our culture.
Speaker A: So take me back to election day 2020, like election day itself.
Speaker A: Like, did you have a routine?
Speaker A: Like, you got a cup of coffee, you, like, reported at 06:00 a.m.
Speaker A: whatever.
Speaker B: Your routine is, you don’t sleep the night before because you get home really late from getting all the prep work done.
Speaker B: And then that morning, my alarm would usually go off around 3330 in the morning, would get to work no later than 05:00 a.m.
Speaker B: and just really, you’re kind of in troubleshoot mode all day long.
Speaker B: We’ve got an absentee counting board that’s going through processing absentee ballots.
Speaker B: 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 of questions about, where am I supposed to vote?
Speaker B: How am I supposed to vote?
Speaker B: People that are doing same day registration, I have a team that’s handling that.
Speaker B: So there’s.
Speaker B: There are a lot of different moving parts on election day in different areas that you need to all run smoothly, and you’re pretty much watching the operation all day, and then in quick response mode if something needs your attention.
Speaker A: Eventually, you realized there’d been some kind of mistake that had gotten through from your team.
Speaker A: How’d you realize that?
Speaker A: Like, what happened at the end of.
Speaker B: Election night, you know, 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 and running some reporting at about 130 in the morning.
Speaker B: 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.
Speaker B: And so we realized the error.
Speaker B: We had to back it out, process all the ballots through again, and then save it correctly as an absentee file.
Speaker B: It was discovered later that within 24 hours that there were actually two files out there with the same votes on them.
Speaker B: So they had to back out one of the files.
Speaker A: So it could have been that votes were double counted.
Speaker B: Right.
Speaker B: So it was.
Speaker B: The precinct file was sent twice, basically, for the absentees.
Speaker A: Oh, God.
Speaker A: As the clerk, you must have been like, oh, no.
Speaker A: Like, no.
Speaker B: Oh, every clerk is, oh, no.
Speaker B: Right.
Speaker B: I mean, clerks are type a perfectionist, and all they want to do is do the job and do it right.
Speaker B: And you put hours and hours and hours into processes in making sure that everything goes perfectly, and it just.
Speaker B: Sometimes it doesn’t.
Speaker B: And so, again, we were able to correct it within hours of discovering it, fixed the problem.
Speaker B: And at that point, the local press, the Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, had all reported on it.
Speaker B: It’s Thursday afternoon at this point, and, you know, everything is taken care of.
Speaker B: There’s a canvassing period after election day that allows for mistakes to be corrected.
Speaker A: That’s so interesting because it’s like you, like, anticipate, like, there are going to be mistakes.
Speaker A: We’re going to need this grace period.
Speaker B: We’re dealing with humans, right?
Speaker B: When you’re dealing with humans, things are going to happen.
Speaker B: There are going to be mistakes made.
Speaker B: That’s what the canvassing period is.
Speaker B: There is a time period in law that allows it to be fixed and corrected before it’s certified.
Speaker A: How did the rest of the world find out about this error?
Speaker A: Like, 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?
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: 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, really, that nominated me to be their candidate for Oakland county clerk.
Speaker B: So it was filled with individuals who probably had voted for me, maybe had contributed to my campaign, had my signs in their yard.
Speaker B: And she makes a statement in the press conference along the lines of, just last night in Oakland county, we found 2000 ballots that had been given to Democrats that were republican ballots due to a clerical error.
Speaker B: And this took place in Rochester Hills, in Wayne county.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker A: I watched this press conference.
Speaker A: You can literally hear people audibly gasping.
Speaker B: You can hear people gasp, right?
Speaker B: Because she never says my name, but they know.
Speaker B: They know where I’m the city clerk at that time.
Speaker B: They know my name.
Speaker B: They know who I am, where I work.
Speaker B: So it was true shock in that moment for them to have that being said about me.
Speaker B: You know, the frustrating part of that was nobody ever contacted me from the county party, from the RNC, to say, can you explain what happened here?
Speaker B: There was no desire to reach out to me and find out what had happened.
Speaker B: And was there an explanation?
Speaker B: It was just, like you said, put on blast.
Speaker B: I also had members of the president at that time, his staff started tweeting about me.
Speaker A: President Trump’s staff, correct.
Speaker A: Using your name.
Speaker B: Yes.
Speaker A: That must have scared you.
Speaker B: You know, it’s surreal, right?
Speaker B: I mean, you just.
Speaker B: I’m a city clerk in a community of 75,000.
Speaker B: I’m highly respected in my state amongst other clerks and, you know, even known across the country for my election contributions.
Speaker B: And to have that happen and to be so, like, dedicated to the profession and to perfection, it was absolutely devastating to me personally and also professionally, to feel that my people in my community might have thought that I let them down or that I did something wrong.
Speaker B: I had to correct the record because I wanted the people of my community to know that you can feel confident in the way your elections, the election was handled and how the ballots were processed.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker A: You posted your own video, right, explaining things.
Speaker B: I did I recorded a probably less than two minute video.
Speaker B: All ballots are and have been accounted for.
Speaker B: There were no missing ballots.
Speaker B: The accusation that 2000 ballots were found is categorically false as a Republican.
Speaker B: So I put the video out on Twitter, and within 72 hours, I had 1.2 million views of the video.
Speaker A: Were you going viral in a good way?
Speaker B: The positive side for me is always, did the public get the truth?
Speaker B: And the public got the truth from me about what happened.
Speaker B: The downside to that is, does it cause me to be put in a national spotlight even more?
Speaker B: Yes.
Speaker B: Yes, it did.
Speaker A: After the break, how that national spotlight would make Tina a target.
Speaker A: 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.
Speaker A: Can you just take me back to that moment when you first heard it?
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: So walking into the office, one of the first things I would always do is fire up the computer, right?
Speaker B: Cause you’re getting ready to check emails, and then I’ll look at the phone to see if the light’s flashing, if I had voicemails.
Speaker B: And so I sat 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.
Speaker A: Did you recognize the voice?
Speaker B: No.
Speaker B: No, I didn’t recognize the voice.
Speaker B: I didn’t know who it was.
Speaker B: Frankly.
Speaker B: I didn’t know who it was for three years.
Speaker B: 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, somebody who knew me from something.
Speaker B: Again, I had ran for office, so I had visibility as far as my face goes.
Speaker B: Is it somebody who’s intentionally going to seek me out?
Speaker B: Are they, you know, these.
Speaker B: All these things, all these questions that run through your mind in that moment of, does this imper, this person intend to make good on this?
Speaker B: And can I ever really relax?
Speaker B: Because they say, when you least expect it.
Speaker B: And I think that that’s part of what, you know, lends to this state of hyper vigilance, if you will, is because there is this, am I going to allow myself to be in a when you least expect it moment?
Speaker A: You said you didn’t know who he was, this person’s identity, until three years later, Andrew Nichols, the man who we now know, left this voicemail, he pled guilty to doing it.
Speaker A: He’s going to be sentenced in July, right?
Speaker B: July 9.
Speaker A: Are you gonna be at Andrew Nichols sentencing?
Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker B: I’m working on my victim impact statement now.
Speaker A: What do you want him to know?
Speaker B: Certainly want him to know that.
Speaker B: And I want the judge to know 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.
Speaker B: You know, there’s a mental part of this for a victim that they never get to walk away from.
Speaker B: But what I would like to say, too, is that while, yes, it’s like I live in a state of hyper vigilance, I admit that all those things, his threat to me did not cause me to back down.
Speaker B: If anything, it fueled a fire in me to make sure that anybody who finds theirself in the position that I was in feels that they have the ability to respond in the situation, that they are resilient enough to deal with it.
Speaker B: All it’s done is make me better at what I do.
Speaker B: So I win.
Speaker B: I win in this, and every election official in this country wins.
Speaker A: Your organization now is called the Committee for safe and secure elections.
Speaker A: You’re traveling around trying to prepare workers for 2024, connecting them with law enforcement, helping them make a plan.
Speaker A: When you arrive at a new place, what’s the first thing you do?
Speaker B: When we arrive in a new city?
Speaker B: I mean, we often familiarize ourselves prior to going to a city or county or even state with election laws as well as even their laws when it comes to things like whether they’re an open carry state, that sort of thing.
Speaker B: But also, for me in particular, I’m fortunate to often travel with a member of law enforcement who’s one of our teammates on the committee for safe and secure elections.
Speaker B: But the times that I do travel alone, I’m obviously kind of scoping out my where I’m going to be ahead of time, looking at maps and areas around there, making sure I’m in a safe location.
Speaker A: Hold it.
Speaker A: I didn’t actually think that that would be what you would be doing.
Speaker A: Like, thinking about your safety at all times.
Speaker A: The two things you need to know are, like, what are the election laws?
Speaker A: And is this an open carry state?
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that’s prep work that we’re doing ahead of time, but it’s also about personnel safety, making sure that wherever I’m going, that I feel safe.
Speaker A: When you talk to election workers, all over the country.
Speaker A: What are they telling you?
Speaker A: What is most striking to you about what they’re telling you?
Speaker B: Well, I think, you know, some of it is it doesn’t matter what state they they live in or it doesn’t matter the size of their community or their county that they’re working in or whether they’re operating at a state level, county level, local level, it doesn’t matter.
Speaker B: What they’re all facing is the same.
Speaker B: There’s a common problem, and that’s a dehumanization of their profession and an attack on their profession.
Speaker A: How are they seeing it?
Speaker A: Like, what are the stories that stick with you specifically?
Speaker B: I had one of the election officials recently tell me she’s like, I probably take ten calls a day where someone yells at me on the phone and it has nothing to do with our community.
Speaker B: They’re mad at government.
Speaker B: They’re mad at elections.
Speaker B: They’re mad at the country right now.
Speaker B: They’re mad at the president, and they’re taking that out on this local level.
Speaker B: Because, again, this dehumanization of election officials has taken place.
Speaker B: And, you know, that’s no longer like Tina Barton, somebody they go to church with or somebody that their kids play soccer together or somebody that they’re part of the same book club or somebody, you know, that they know through the community.
Speaker B: It’s that person is a representation of what they are mad about, and that’s government and elections.
Speaker A: It’s interesting in some ways.
Speaker A: I wonder if you feel lucky because you had this awful experience that’s made you hyper vigilant and changed your life, but, you know, who called you, and they’re being punished because it’s just interesting to compare, for instance, what happened to you, to what happened with someone like Ruby Freeman in Georgia, who, of course, testified before the January 6 committee.
Speaker A: She was held up as an example of a bad actor by some prominent Republicans.
Speaker A: She received a ton of threats.
Speaker A: I think the New York Times had 400 threats against her, but only one resulted in a prosecution.
Speaker B: Yeah, I do feel lucky that Andrew Nichols has been charged and will be sentenced very soon.
Speaker B: Like I said, that’s a win for me, but it’s also a win for the entire elections community for them to see that someone was held accountable.
Speaker B: When you look at the numbers, as high as almost 40% have been threatened, harassed, or abused.
Speaker B: The challenge is that are these being reported?
Speaker B: And then if they are being reported, are they reaching a threshold that law enforcement feels is actionable, that the prosecutor will actually prosecute for?
Speaker B: And that as it goes through that filter is not always reaching the point where it brings somebody in and holds them accountable.
Speaker B: And so there’s a lot of frustration with that.
Speaker A: You know, the Biden administration created a task force in 2021 to help local officials deal with threats to election workers.
Speaker A: Do you think it’s made a difference?
Speaker B: I think that there has been a real combined effort through multiple organizations and even federal partners, all the way down to state partners and locals of everyone recognizing this is a moment that no one group is going to fix, no one task force is going to fix this problem, but it takes all of us.
Speaker B: And I think that everyone’s doing the best that they can, and that’s really what the focus is.
Speaker B: And I think everybody is doing what they can in the moment to help them be prepared and make sure that it’s a safe, secure election cycle.
Speaker A: Tina, I’m really grateful for your time.
Speaker A: Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker B: Oh, thank you.
Speaker A: Tina Barton is a senior elections expert at the elections group.
Speaker A: And that’s our show.
Speaker A: What next is produced by Paige Osborne, Elena Schwartz, Rob Gunther, Madeline Ducharme and Anna Phillips.
Speaker A: We are led by Alicia Montgomery with a little boost from Susan Matthews.
Speaker A: Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations here at Slate.
Speaker A: And I’m Mary Harris.
Speaker A: Thanks for listening.
Speaker A: Catch you back here next time.