Newsletter: Issue 35

Published: October 7, 2026

In this issue:

Situation Room: Physical threats and harassment remain an ongoing reality for our community, but clear procedures and strong law enforcement connections help keep everyone safe.
Resource Library: Personal Security for Election Officials: Protecting Yourself and Your Family is a new safety guide covering everything from home audits to safer commutes for you and your loved ones.
Planning Desk: Four weeks out is the perfect time to catch small operational cracks, test backups, and align with key security partners!
New Exchange Webinar October 14 at 3:00 PM ET! Securing elections is also about securing yourself and your people, but protecting your team involves more than reducing their online presence or preparing them to respond to confrontation. It also means recognizing the mental and physical strain of long hours, public scrutiny, repeated hostility, and high pressure work. Register here to join us for the Exchange-hosted webinar: Secure Your People, Secure Yourself: Getting Yourself and Your Staff Ready to Face Any Situation on Election Day and Beyond.

Situation Room

The Evolving Physical Threat Environment for Election Officials

In March of this year, a Pennsylvania man was sentenced to ten months in prison and fined $5,000 for death threats he made via text message against a Pennsylvania poll watcher. The victim posted a phone number online in an effort to recruit volunteers for the upcoming midterm elections. In an impact statement, the poll watcher stated that the threats led to “a year-long ordeal filled with fear and constant vigilance.”

Election officials continue to face a threat environment that goes well beyond the traditional challenges of administering an election. Threats, harassment, swatting, doxxing, and concerns about physical safety can adversely affect officials, their employees, and their families.

A 2026 Brennan Center survey found that 32% of local election officials reported experiencing threats, harassment, or abuse because of their jobs. The survey shows that many officials remain worried about their own safety and that of their colleagues.

Earlier this year, the former election security lead at the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office, Nikki Fisher, published a postgraduate thesis researching threats and violence against election workers. It catalogs 21 separate cases, identifying behavioral indicators, patterns of radicalization, and shared characteristics among prosecuted election crime cases.

Why It Matters

Threats to election officials can divert staff time and resources, affect morale, and make it more difficult to recruit and retain election workers.

Threats can also adversely affect election operations. An incident at an election office or polling location can require a rapid response from election personnel, law enforcement, and other agencies while the election continues.

Not every angry call, email, or social-media post is a security threat. Election officials routinely face criticism as part of their public responsibilities. The key is being able to distinguish protected speech and ordinary criticism from conduct that presents a credible threat to people, facilities, or election operations.

Defensive Actions

Election officials should consider taking the following steps:

Build relationships with law enforcement. Establish points of contact and response procedures before an emergency occurs.
Preserve evidence. Train employees to retain threatening emails, texts, voicemails, social-media posts, and other evidence.
Review physical security. Self-evaluate building access, cameras, lighting, employee entrances, reception areas, and emergency procedures, or have a professional physical security assessment performed by a third party.
Protect personal information. Review and limit publicly available employee information. Establish procedures for responding to doxxing or other exposure of personal information.
Train employees. Make sure staff know how to recognize escalating behavior, report concerns, and summon assistance.
Communicate internally. Employees should know exactly who to contact when they receive a threat and how information will be shared.
Coordinate with other jurisdictions. Sharing information about emerging threats and effective security practices can help offices prepare before an incident occurs.

The objective is not to treat every disagreement as a security emergency. However, you should have clear, practiced procedures for recognizing when a situation has crossed the line, and for responding quickly and appropriately when it does, to minimize the impact on operations.

The Situation Room focuses on real security incidents and threats in the news relevant to election security. To review previous issues, see the newsletter archive.

Resource Library

Personal Security for Election Officials

Personal Security for Election Officials: Protecting Yourself and Your Family is a new guide from the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections that focuses on three domains of security:

Securing Your Home leads you through basic security upgrades, like strengthening door and window security or adding cameras. It suggests considerations for a home security audit and stresses the importance of security conversations with family, neighbors, and law enforcement.
Securing Your Commute offers suggestions for making your vehicle more anonymous, raising your situational awareness when driving, and collecting information that could help identify anyone following you.
Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Personal Information looks at the intersection of your online and physical neighborhoods. Talking in public places, providing photos online, and visible clues in your home or on your property can all create vulnerabilities a harasser could exploit. The guide provides advice on limiting what people can learn about you.

Each section offers additional advice for moments “When Threat Levels Rise”—how to raise your security fences when it matters most. Two final sections underline the importance of documenting security incidents, even those that seem mild, and seeking emotional support or mental health assistance because the psychological impact of harassment can be deep.

Even if you don’t look at Personal Security for Election Officials today, bookmark it, and remember it’s available. If you face a troubling security situation, you may want to find it quickly.

The Resource Library section of the newsletter spotlights election security resources. All highlighted resources are available online in the Resource Library.

Planning Desk

Week E-4: Covering Your Operational Bases with High-Impact Steps for the Final Stretch

October is the final window for election officials to shrink operational risk before it has a chance to snowball. This is when small cracks tend to show themselves, and extra vigilance provides the opportunity to tighten operations.

Enter November with greater operational resilience using these security best practices:

Meet with key security partners for final review.
Verify online election information is accurate and current.
- Why now: Outdated or incorrect information damages trust in the electoral process. If your official election information is hard to find, out of date, or split between an old .com and a new .gov website, voters and AI tools may turn to a lookalike domain or a page someone else controls instead.
- To-dos: Make your official information easier for voters and AI systems to find and trust.
  - Tell voters now where official election information lives.
  - Verify your official social media accounts and list them on your website.
  - Prepare a short holding statement (e.g., “That video did not come from us.”), so it is ready when needed.
  - Review You’re the Authority on Elections. Does AI Know That?
Identify sensitive information and vulnerabilities.
- Why now: Small details that seem harmless on their own can be valuable to an adversary and assembled together to identify weak points or sensitive information in your operations.
- To-dos: Reduce risk by putting safeguards in place to protect sensitive information and operational details, as suggested by First Things First: Operational Security Fast Wins.
  - Determine your level of vulnerability using the Digital Footprint Self-Assessment Worksheet.
  - Use our Issue 5 Planning Desk for a 30-minute check-in with your team.
  - Reduce details included in public staff directories and direct contact lists.
  - Standardize responses to operational questions.
  - Delay posts about travel and real-time location.
  - Shield internal information from casual capture (e.g., screens, whiteboards, and printed documents).
  - Rethink name badge practices.
Maintain active monitoring.
- Why now: Active monitoring helps spot emerging issues early, mitigate them before they escalate, and catch and correct false narratives before they take root.
- To-dos: Monitor and update safeguards as operations, threats, and risks change.
  - Track your online presence by regularly checking what’s circulating about your office and how your messaging appears on search engines and social media platforms. The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence has a checklist on low-tech options for monitoring your name space.
  - Ensure detective measures are in place and working, such as alarms, cameras, tamper-evident seals, and chain of custody tracking.
  - Take 30 minutes to review your chain of custody procedures from end to end, guided by our Issue 27 Planning Desk.
  - Assess effectiveness with regular reviews and inspections, and update procedures and security measures as needed.
  - Minimize the risk of authorized persons causing harm with First Things First: Insider Threats.
  - Consider implementing real-time monitoring on Election Day; see Lowering the Impact of Logistical Issues for practical guidance.
Verify redundancies and backups.
- Why now: In this final month, it’s critical to keep operations up and running, and many types of hazards can cause loss of access to systems and data used to administer an election. Redundancies and backups* allow you to restore and/or continue operations with minimal disruption.
  * Redundancy mitigates the risk of downtime, and backup mitigates the risk of data loss.
- To-dos: Follow the PACE planning principle to build a chain of reliable fallbacks so a single point of failure doesn’t stop your operations.
  - Ensure alternate devices and systems are functional and available.
  - Confirm backups exist, are recent, and can be restored.
  - Print or save offline copies of critical procedures and data.
  - Check power and connectivity backups.
  - Review and test alternate solutions for communicating with key stakeholders.
  - Ensure staff know who to call and what to do if something breaks.