Maine passes law protecting poll workers facing increased threats since the 2020 election

Judy Woodruff:

Unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud have led Republican-controlled legislatures to shake up election laws in many states leading into this midterm cycle.

As William Brangham explains, the people who oversee elections have been caught in the middle.

William Brangham:

Judy, in a survey conducted by the Brennan Center last month, 77 percent of local election officials said they think threats against them have increased in recent years; 17 percent say they have been — personally been threatened themselves because of their work.

In Maine, a new law signed by the governor last week makes threats against election workers a misdemeanor.

Shenna Bellows is Maine's secretary of state, and she oversees elections there.

Secretary, great to have you on the "NewsHour."

Obviously, it sounds like election workers in states all over the country feel that they are under siege in some way. What kinds of things were you hearing from Maine's election workers that made you want to support this law?

Shenna Bellows, Maine Secretary of State: So, what we are seeing all across the country is an increase in threats against election workers.

And it's really a consequence of the big lie about 2020 and disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. Reuters documented more than 850 threats against election workers nationwide. And, here in Maine, we had election workers whose lives were threatened.

One election worker who wishes to remain anonymous had a voter come in with a weapon threatening that person. And so election workers asked us to move forward with legislation to protect them to make it a crime, to get — put it under the jurisdiction of the attorney general, and to create a system for reporting when these incidents happen, and also training to help election workers protect themselves and their polling places.

William Brangham:

I mean, it's got to be, I don't know what the word is, but incredibly dispiriting that you have to pass a law to try to deter this kind of behavior.

Shenna Bellows:

It's very upsetting.

I was talking yesterday to a clerk who has been in this work for over 20 years. And she said, when she started out, voters would make her pies. At the polling places on Election Day, there would be hugging. It would be like a big family reunion. And, unfortunately, that has changed.

Suddenly, people are blaming her if the results don't go the way they should, or casting aspersion or spreading conspiracies. And I think the atmosphere has changed significantly. And we need to do more to step up to protect our election workers.

William Brangham:

I mean, as you touched on earlier, these threats and intimidation seem to come from this endlessly repeated lie that the 2020 election was stolen and that there is somehow widespread fraud in the elections process, for which there is no evidence, we should continually say.

How do you, as your state's top election official, push back against that incredible tide?

Shenna Bellows:

So, suddenly, election administration, which is actually a very routine, very technical, very precise, almost boring job, has become also an exercise in public education.

So, first and foremost, we're recruiting members of the public to get involved in our elections as poll workers, as volunteers to see for themselves firsthand how our elections work. And then we talk about the process.

Today, I was talking to high school students.I was reminding them that, when you go into vote, you state your name. Your name gets crossed off on a list, the voter participation list. And then you go in. Those ballots are tallied. The number of ballots is compared against the number of names who voted, just all the technical steps, which hopefully you're not yawning as I'm describing them, but are the checks and balances in our elections.

And our local election officials and state election officials work very hard to ensure our elections are free, safe and accessible to all. And we should be very proud of that here in Maine and across the country.

William Brangham:

I mean, your former Governor Paul LePage, who is running to get back into the governor's mansion, has made these same allegations, that there was — the 2020 election was stolen, that ballots were stuffed in a prior election, that all the laws need to be redone.

Is there any evidence for the allegations that he has been making?

Shenna Bellows:

None, for two reasons.

First, it would have been big news if that had happened on Election Day, especially in a small state like Maine. We have election hot lines to take every complaint. And we get the gamut, from somebody who's wearing a T-shirt that is political, to a tabulator needs to be updated or fixed.

And so we take all and every election complaint very seriously. Never has there been a complaint that there has been fraud on Election Day or that people have been bused in.

But, second, the processes of checks and balances, of checking the voter participation lists and history, counting the ballots, checking those tallies against the number of people who vote, checking them in the central voter registration system to ensure that everyone who votes is legitimate, and that no one votes twice.

And so those things happen on a routine basis. And there are checks and balances at every level. So, it's impossible, absolutely impossible, for that type of — the suggestion that people get bused into Maine to vote, it couldn't happen.

William Brangham:

When he makes those allegations, he also is then calling for a lot of the things that GOP-controlled legislatures all over the country have been doing, which is really a tightening of the whole process of voting.

I wonder what you make of that process that's happening nationwide. And do you think that there's anything in Maine that you could do to even tighten things in an effective way?

Shenna Bellows:

Remember, voting is fundamental to everything else that we care about.

It's a right guaranteed in our United States Constitution and in our state constitutions. And so what we should be doing is doing everything in our power to make voting accessible and ensuring the integrity of our elections. So I'm very concerned about the rollback of voting rights that we're seeing in other states.

And I'm proud of other measures we have taken in Maine, for example, protecting the chain of custody of ballots and equipment to make sure that partisan actors, third parties like Cyber Ninjas, can never have access to them.

We have also done things like making voter registration easier. We just passed online voter registration a year ago. We just passed a bill the governor signed into law last week, legislation to allow tribal I.D.s to be used as proof of identity for purposes of voter registration. So we are working to make voting more accessible and protecting election integrity.

And it's concerning to me that some politicians, in pursuit of their own gains, are rolling back fundamental constitutional rights of the citizenry.

William Brangham:

All right, Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state for Maine, thank you so much for being here.

Shenna Bellows:

Thank you. Pleasure.