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Some candidates nationwide have indicated they will not necessarily accept the results of the 2022 midterm races, and election officials are dealing with harassment. Between 1000-1500 threats have been reported to the Department of Justice in the last year. 

“All of this has been a political manipulation,” says Mindy Romero, founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. “It started in 2016 in earnest … we saw the president of the United States at the time, and many others since, who’ve really used this for political gain.”

Romero also points to increased political polarization as a cause — seeing people of the other political party as “really just absolutely counter to who we are, and potentially evil.”

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Celebratory confetti blanketed the Grove on primary night, as developer Rick Caruso — then sporting a multipoint lead in the Los Angeles mayor’s race — declared his to be a “victory story.”

Across town in Highland Park, an exhausted Eunisses Hernandez had already headed home from her election night party at a local bar. Her opponent, incumbent Councilmember Gil Cedillo, was leading by more than 10 percentage points. Hernandez remained hopeful, though some supporters had begun mourning what they thought to be a loss.

But fortune can be a fickle mistress on election night.

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Wealthy Republican donor Robert Beadles offered two options to county commissioners when falsely accusing Nevada's Washoe County registrar of voters of counting fraudulent votes: "either fire her or lock her up."

Following the meeting, County Registrar Deanna Spikula's office was inundated with threats and harassing calls from people convinced she was part of an effort to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald Trump, according to an investigation by Reuters. 

Fearing for her family's safety, Spikula submitted her resignation a few months later. 

Her story highlights the nationwide efforts by Trump allies to replace county government leaders with election conspiracy theorists — one of a number of different approaches that right-wing activists have used since the 2020 presidential election to transform how U.S. elections are run. 

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Inside the office of the Shasta county clerk and registrar of voters, which runs elections for about 111,000 people in this part of far northern California, Cathy Darling Allen can see all the security improvements she would make if she had the budget.

“We have plexi on the counter downstairs for Covid but that won’t stop a person. It’s literally just clamped to the counters,” the county clerk and registrar said. For about $50,000, the office could secure the front, limiting access to upstairs offices, she estimated. Another county put bulletproof glass in their lobby years earlier, she knew, something officials there at one point considered removing, though not any more.

Elections offices didn’t used to think about security in this way, Allen said. Now they can’t afford not to.