"No credible threat" against Minnesota poll workers, but state officials still prepared
MINNEAPOLIS -- Despite a national warning, the risk of violence against Minnesota poll workers next Tuesday is "low," the state's top elections official said. But leaders are still preparing for the worst-case scenario.
The FBI and other federal agencies last Friday issued a bulletin to law enforcement partners nationwide raising concern that those who administer elections could become targets of domestic violent extremists who have grievances about election results.
The intelligence memo said that those involved in the election process are "attractive targets" for these extremists, including at publicly accessible locations like polling places, voter registration sites, and ballot drop box locations.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said his office is aware of the alert and takes it seriously, though risk against the state's 30,000 poll workers is low.
"We have no specific, credible threat next Tuesday at the polling place. I want to be clear about that," said Simon, a Democrat running for re-election this fall. "While I think our risk is low, the risk is never zero, so we want to make sure we're prepared."
He realigned staff to focus on the physical security of elections and offered training to poll workers and local election offices on de-escalation techniques—both new efforts set in motion after the 2020 election, he said, when people made baseless claims of widespread fraud.
A task force at the U.S. Department of Justice looking into election threats found that election officials in states with close elections in 2020 were more likely to receive menacing messages. More than half of the potential criminal threats were in states with recounts, audits and lawsuits like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
In Anoka County, elections manager Tom Hunt said poll workers there haven't received threats, but his office put more of an emphasis on security this year. Law enforcement, he said, gets a list of all polling places in the county should there be an issue. There's also de-escalation training.
"Hearing about those things—it's obviously extremely unfortunate that anyone would threaten an election worker. We're just citizens doing our job making sure elections are run properly," Hunt said.
The secretary of state's office also updated its guidance to local elections officials on laws around who can be at polling places and how they can behave. State law, for example, prohibits most people from being within 100 feet of a polling place if they're not casting a ballot there.
"We have very strict rules on who can be there and how they interact with other folks, so that puts us in a good position" Simon said. "It doesn't guarantee that nothing is going to happen, but it means we have a lower risk, I would say, right at the outset."
A spokeswoman for Hennepin County said election staff received several security trainings. Since 2020, head election judges in Ramsey County receive a "brief" de-escalation training, a spokeswoman there said.