Christine Johnson is the type of American who kisses her ballot and thanks God whenever she votes.
Johnson has volunteered as a poll worker in Minnesota for over 20 years; she currently serves as an election judge in a blue district.
“I love being a part of the process,” Johnson said. “I love helping my neighbors vote.”
One of her favorite sights is when parents bring their children to learn about the voting process. It’s touching to see the reverse as well, she said—adult children helping their elderly parents who are determined to vote in person navigate the polling site.
To Johnson, Election Day feels like a holiday. She knows what this November 5 will look like for her: She’ll start the day before the sun rises, getting dressed and packing a change of shoes, “because you know you’re going to be in a church basement or a bad chair or a bad cement floor all day long.”
She will brew a thermos of coffee to get her from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., when she and her Democratic counterpart will drive the completed paper ballots from their polling site—sometimes a school gymnasium or house of worship—to city hall.
There may be 15 or so election workers, mostly volunteers, working at her site. They set up the machines, post signs directing voters where to go, and go through a checklist of their duties. Then comes another special moment. The group will get in a circle, raise their right hands, and recite an oath “to be impartial and to follow the law and to get it right,” Johnson said. “I get kind of choked up when I do that oath every election.”
Her civic involvement stems from her faith. Shortly after becoming a Christian as a teen, Johnson started taking more interest in the world around her. In college, she was the lone freshman subscribing to periodicals to learn about political theory and systems of governance.
“This is such a rare and precious thing that we get to choose our leaders, and I don’t take that for granted at all,” she said. “I feel for people who … don’t have a constitutional republic or any form of say [in their government]. That just hurts my heart.”
The US election system relies on hundreds of thousands of volunteers like Johnson. But the role she has long seen as an opportunity to serve is now the target of a maelstrom of suspicion from a vocal segment of Americans, including some of her fellow conservatives and fellow Christians.
Partisan attacks on election administration methods, election results, and election officials are not new, but they have become a defining feature of today’s political landscape, with the “stop the steal” rhetoric and claims of election fraud that emerged after Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020. It seems harder than ever for election workers trying to keep the process fair and trustworthy.
In a recent poll of election officials, more than one-third said they experienced threats, harassment, or abuse due to their work. Half voiced safety concerns for their staff, and nearly all have been forced to improve their safety measures.
“It has become more normal, if you are a public servant, to endure threats of intimidation and harassment at pretty significant levels,” Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security, told CT.
Even formerly innocuous roles—city council, county clerk, election workers, or volunteers in civic service “as retirement jobs”—have “these horror stories of [getting] voicemails of somebody threatening to kill their grandchildren,” she added.
Christians called to serve in these roles have found some comfort in their convictions—but they’ve also felt the sting of neighbors and churchgoers demonizing their work.
Kentucky secretary of state Michael Adams recalls his wife and daughter peeling his campaign sticker off their cars after dealing with public confrontations in the parking lots of grocery stores, pharmacies, and even their church.
Secretary of state was supposed to be a relatively boring office. Wonky. Administrative. At least that’s what Adams told his wife, Christina, when he was eyeing the position after years as an attorney working in election law.
He was elected in 2019. He took office weeks before a global pandemic turned routine questions of election administration into fraught public health and safety concerns. Misinformation and deepening institutional distrust inflamed the country’s partisan tensions.
“What used to be a very boring office, and what he assured me was going to be just a very boring term, turned out not to be,” Christina Adams told CT. “It was definitely not what he pictured going in.”
Michael Adams worked across the aisle with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear during the early months of the pandemic to give voters more time and options to vote. With bipartisan support in the state legislature, Kentucky expanded absentee and early voting access and opened countywide polling centers. Turnout was up, with three-quarters of voters in the June 2020 primary voting absentee.
Some Republicans criticized the changes. Social media trolls did their worst. Hate mail arrived in Michael Adams’s inbox and at his house. Even a false alarm by his new home security system had the family initially terrified that one of his online attackers had decided to follow through on the barrage of death threats.
“We were on edge, a bit more than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Christina Adams said. “That was the first time I was actually nervous for our safety.”
It was hard for Michael Adams to watch all the politics around his job—a job that was supposed to be boring, a job that was supposed to combine his legal expertise with his Christian calling to public service—disrupt his family’s life.
The controversies around the tight presidential vote in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia in 2020 are well-known. But even in deep red states, and even in the years since, the work of state and local officials continues to be shaped by election-related conspiracy theories brought by concerned voters.
Adams said it used to be that only a handful of secretaries of state faced intense pressure and controversy, often because they were in purple states with close races. “The rest of us kind of thought, Well, there but for the grace of God go I,” Adams said. But by the 2022 midterms, “We all felt that way.”
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has found 1,546 proven cases of election fraud. These include anything from mailing an absentee ballot for someone who has died to voting despite being ineligible to tampering with or damaging ballot drop boxes.
More than 1,313 of the cases tracked by Heritage resulted in criminal prosecution, while the rest led to civil penalties, judicial findings, or other actions. That tally spans over a decade of elections—meaning in any given state, in any given year, there could be up to a handful of illegitimate ballots in a particular race, nowhere near the level needed to swing an election.
The think tank notes that the database is nonexhaustive. But even based on Heritage’s numbers, “the amount of proven election fraud is miniscule,” the Brookings Institution wrote.
Yet it seems like there’s more distrust than ever around the election system. Americans hear more about suspected or alleged fraud. In Colorado, former county clerk Tina Peters claimed she was “called” to expose election fraud in 2020 by revealing voting machine data; she lost her job and faced 10 charges of official misconduct and tampering with the election.
Former president Donald Trump’s allies filed 62 lawsuits following the 2020 election, mostly in battleground states that Biden won. All but one of the lawsuits, including those that reached the Supreme Court, failed, according to one USA Today analysis.
Illustration by Tyler ComrieThe outlier was a case in Pennsylvania where a judge ruled that voters could not return and “cure” their ballots in the days following an election if they had failed to provide proper identification at the time of voting. The ruling did not affect the outcome in the state, where Biden won by over 80,000 votes. But that hasn’t always slowed the suspicion and vitriol.
Claims of a rigged election have continued to feature prominently in Trump’s reelection bid. And the lawsuits, allegations of wrongdoing, and misinformation have convinced a sizable share of the GOP that Trump’s loss was illegitimate: In a poll from last year, only 57 percent of Republicans believed Biden legitimately won.
Threats to poll workers and election officials have gotten so bad that the Justice Department launched a task force to deal with them. Workers have reported more than 2,000 threats in the past three years. Around 100 are being investigated.
One prominent case from 2020 involved two officials in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. They were accused by Trump ally Rudy Giuliani of committing election fraud. Freeman received over 400 threats and had to move from her home. Last year, they won a $148 million defamation case against Giuliani. But as for all the threats, only one person ended up facing charges.
Freeman, who is a Christian, said upon winning the lawsuit that “my friends say that God knew who to give this assignment to because ain’t no way we could do this. God chose me to go through this because he knows that I would tell everyone whose path I cross about Jesus.”
‘The Most Important Election of Our Lifetime’
In Kentucky, Michael Adams also found faith to be a lifeline.
“I can’t imagine doing this job, or any job, without having faith,” Adams said. He described one incident where people marched outside the state capitol with AR-15 rifles during a protest over COVID-19 restrictions. “I do think a lot of people have prayed really, really hard for me the last several years.”
While he was in the thick of the online hate, several people from his family’s church reached out, even a few who were on the opposite side of the political spectrum.
“I felt like that was probably the Spirit encouraging us,” Christina Adams said. “It was actually encouraging to know how many homes were open to us, should we need to leave ours. That’s what really touched me. I mean, maybe five or six said, ‘You need a place to stay, come on over.’ … That meant the world.”
When Adams ran for reelection, Republicans recruited two challengers for the primary, both of whom campaigned on claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Adams won 118 out of 120 counties in 2023. In the months since, things have settled down—somewhat. As a keepsake of more turbulent times, in one corner of his office he keeps a red posterboard sign: FIRE MICHAEL ADAMS.
Adams said he’s worried less about threats than about whether his office will have enough poll workers or polling locations. It takes 15,000 people to run a statewide election. Adams’s staff is around 35.
“You do the math. I have to rely on volunteers, thousands and thousands of volunteers,” he said. “I think it’s healthy for our system that it’s, number one, primarily citizen operated, volunteer operated. And, number two, that it’s citizens from both sides of the aisle.”
But that means relying on people’s willingness and civic-mindedness to step up to the plate and volunteer. This becomes harder in a fraught atmosphere. After Kentucky voted to allow abortion protections in the state constitution in 2022, some Kentucky churches serving as voting locations faced enough scrutiny that they decided not to do it again.
Church doors are still open to voters in Glendale, Kentucky, population 2,227.
Mike Bell—called Brother Mike Bell by congregants and townspeople alike—dreamed of being the mayor growing up. He’s as close as you can get in his tiny unincorporated town. He’s on steering committees, chairs the Hardin County Water Board, is chaplain to the chamber of commerce, and is also probably one of the most famous voices in town.
Bell calls basketball and football games, trading his preacher cadence for drawn-out vowels—“Te-e-rrrrry Buckle!” he demonstrated at his office—and rhythmic cheers. Kids love it so much they use clips of his voice as their ringtones.
Bell’s office at Glendale Christian Church is dotted with references to It’s a Wonderful Life: Behind a coffee cup with a picture of George Bailey on it is a certificate of Bell’s baptism, very faded, along with a few dollars—the first $15 he ever made from preaching.
“Glendale is kind of like Bedford Falls,” he said. “And I’ve lived a wonderful life. You know, sometimes I wonder if God’s already given me heaven.” (He added with a chuckle, “But then the next day he gives me a little hell, so I know it’s not.”)
Bell’s life demonstrates one of his core beliefs: that Christians are called to serve their neighbors and communities, not exist apart from them. “To be a real preacher, you got to be down there with them,” he said. “Jesus walked among them. You got to walk among them.”
So he’s opened the church’s doors to the Lions Club, the town’s business association, a local quilting group—and, again this November, to voters.
The church has served as a polling site on and off for over three decades, a commitment that costs them about a week with all the setup and teardown of equipment. Bell would bring doughnuts and coffee for poll workers.
“It’s a great opportunity, because you’re being a part of the community,” he said. He wants to see more Christians be active in politics—not necessarily talking politics from the pulpit but serving at the ballot box and taking the time to vote.
Hardin County clerk Brian Smith agrees. Being a Christian in public life is his way of trying to make his community better. When concerns around election processes or results come up, he says his faith motivates him to respond to people’s concerns with respect, try to get things right, and be transparent about mistakes and human error when they are made.
But when he’s not buried in records or working on election-related duties, he can often be found chatting with people lined up to renew their license plates or update their driver’s licenses.
In his office, he keeps packs of water bottles to hand out when the line gets long.
Smith believes addressing election-related tension and regaining trust will require more civic involvement. And he’s starting early, wheeling the county’s voting machines into elementary schools for mock elections.
Second graders voting for superhero candidates—say, Hulk for sheriff—vote on the machines, print their ballots, and scan them in. Officials go through the process with them as if it’s Election Day.
When kids filled out the wrong spot, Smith’s staff showed them how to document a spoiled ballot. When characters like Wonder Woman and Captain America tied for county clerk, they double-checked the results and went on to a coin flip (in Kentucky, tied races are decided by the casting of lots).
“It was a great lesson that every vote counts. If a vote can end in a tie, you better believe that your vote counts,” Smith said. “We used that same equipment and then we hand-counted the results, and it matched our machine results. The kids got to see from a very early age what election integrity is all about.”
The civics lesson was such a hit that a nearby middle school invited the clerk’s office to operate their student council election.
“I gotta tell you, those kids took their jobs seriously,” Smith said. “They made sure everybody got just one ballot.” After ballots were counted, Michael Adams made an appearance to certify the results.
In Minnesota, Christine Johnson also wants to repair the rifts in trust, for the sake of poll workers’ safety and for the sake of democracy.
When people accuse the process of being rigged, Johnson recalls the checklists volunteers follow, how they make sure people from different parties tag-team on all the key tasks, the layers of audits, and the way the paper trail is double- and sometimes triple-checked.
“I can’t speak for every state,” Johnson said, “but when it comes to the care for the ballots and the process where the voter is having their input, it’s like, oh my gosh, our city clerk, she just runs such a tight ship.
“I just tell people, well, my experience is that you have nothing to worry about.”
Johnson has found that her firsthand experience is rarely convincing.
“They’ll say, ‘Well, maybe that’s okay there, but how do you know it’s good everywhere else?’ Or they’ll bring up other states. Or they’ll go, ‘Well, you know, they would be able to trick you too. They’re going to do it secretly behind the scenes and you wouldn’t even be aware of it.’”
She’s not sure what election officials can do to combat the distrust. “Sometimes I’ll even say to some of the more skeptical friends, ‘You know what, you should sign up. You should have your own experience.’
“And you know,” she added, “no one’s ever taken me up on that.”
Harvest Prude is Christianity Today’s political correspondent.
This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Election Interference".
Related
