Election offices in at least six states have received letters containing white powder, raising fears of further threats or violence as officials enter the final week before the midterm elections.
The FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service told the Daily Mail that investigations remain ongoing into as many as 100 suspicious mailings sent to election administrators this month.
The reports have heightened anxiety among state and local officials as Election Day approaches, with millions of Americans preparing to visit polling places and cast their ballots.
Authorities have not determined who is behind the suspicious mailings.
Some election officials have pointed to what they describe as incendiary rhetoric from President Donald Trump, warning that his repeated allegations of voter fraud could place them at greater risk of harassment and violence.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes accused Trump of “ginning up” division ahead of the midterms. In a CNN interview, Fontes called the president’s conduct “wholly and completely irresponsible.”
“Unfortunately, the president has a very broad reach and his audience takes him very seriously,” Fontes said. He added that some of his colleagues had personally had their dogs poisoned. “My own family has been threatened. I have been threatened.”
The White House has defended the president’s election-related actions, saying they are intended to prevent voter fraud and ensure federal election laws are enforced.
President Donald Trump speaks during the RNC convention in Dallas, Texas. Trump has urged voters to “pretend he is on the ballot” in an effort to boost Republican support in the November elections
This 2020 photo shows election specialists packing bags in a room filled with counted ballots the day after the election in North Carolina
A scene from the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, after protesters breached the nation’s Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the presidential election results
“No one has done more than President Trump to ensure America has free and fair elections,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Daily Mail.
The threats have continued despite the investigation. Law enforcement officials said more than 100 letters were sent to state and local election facilities in October, with officials in Louisiana, Ohio and Oklahoma reporting that they had been targeted.
In Louisiana, a state employee was taken to the hospital as a precaution after opening one of the letters, while the building was evacuated.
More than three dozen congressional offices have also received letters containing a white, powdery substance in recent weeks.
At least 10 people were exposed to white powder mailed to the New York offices of Democrats Hakeem Jeffries, Ritchie Torres and Tom Suozzi, local outlets reported earlier this month.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Texas Senator Ted Cruz also appear to have been targeted, according to ABC News and Axios.
The incidents have forced state and local election officials to move quickly, training employees on how to prepare for and respond to an expanding range of threats.
Many officials are working with organizations such as the nonpartisan Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE). The group, made up of current and former election officials and law enforcement personnel, provides security training for election staff at the state and local levels.
Tina Barton, the group’s co-chair, told the Daily Mail that she has conducted more than 140 security training sessions for state and local election staff ahead of the November 3 elections. That is a sharp increase from 2024, when she led about 67 sessions.
Demand, she said in an interview, has ‘substantially increased’ in the past two years – due to the rise of new, sophisticated technologies, as well as an awareness from the law enforcement community that these threats ‘aren’t going away.’
The group briefs sheriffs offices, election workers, and police departments on emerging threats, deescalation techniques, and other safety measures.
They also run ‘tabletop exercises’ to prepare for responding to bomb threats, suspicious packages, swatting and disruption from possible drone use.
A voter fills out his ballot for the first day of in-person voting in Kansas. Other states are on alert following the multiple state election offices that were targeted by suspicious letters containing an ‘unknown substance’
Despite their local roles, these individuals receive an outsize amount of harassment and threats – a Brennan Center study conducted this year found that 32 percent of election officials said they have been ‘threatened, harassed, or abused’ for doing their job.
Barton, a former Republican city clerk in Michigan, has experienced this harassment first-hand. ‘I had my life threatened in 2020,’ she told the Daily Mail, referring to a man who called her and vowed to kill her and her family in deeply explicit terms.
The individual, Andrew Nickels, of Carmel, Indiana, was charged with making interstate threats to an election worker, and was sentenced to more than a year in prison in 2023.
Now, she’s hoping to protect other election officials from experiencing the same.
Barton said politicians with a following must choose their words carefully.
‘Every action they take evolves into a reaction by people who believe them and trust them,’ she said. ‘We all have a responsibility when we know we have authority.’
Faith in the system is incredibly fragile: Just six in ten Americans say they would trust the election results, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.
A PBS News/Marist survey earlier this month found that 30 percent of voters believe violence might be necessary to get the country back on track.
Some states have moved to beef up security at polling locations in response, and embrace a bevy of unique solutions to protect election workers this November.
Some counties in Georgia and Nevada have issued ‘panic buttons’ at polling locations, which that transmit GPS coordinates and photographs directly to the local sheriff’s offices and emergency dispatchers in the event they are pressed.
In Los Angeles County, election workers have teamed up with bomb-sniffing canine teams to screen incoming mail.
And in Durham County, North Carolina, polling sites are now equipped with bulletproof glass, security cameras, and state-of-the-art mail ventilation rooms – including a separate exhaust system to contain potentially hazardous substances.
The flurry of threats comes as the president has pushed for greater federal control over elections during his second term.
He signed two executive orders seeking to regulate states’ use of mail-in ballots, an effort blocked last month by the Supreme Court – and has repeatedly claimed that noncitizens are voting illegally, despite studies that show such cases are extremely rare.
Last week the Justice Department sued California after the state refused to purge 20,000 suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls.
In a separate case, a federal judge blocked the Department of Homeland Security from examining voter rolls in nine states under its ‘Unlawful Voting Initiative’. The department is likely to appeal.
Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket, argued that the fear-mongering is a far greater threat to elections than any instances of voter fraud itself.
‘In a nation of 340 million Americans, where you have hundreds of millions of voters voting in each election, a couple of voters or a dozen voters who vote illegally is not changing the outcome of anything,’ he said.
Barton, the CSSE co-chair, said the unfortunate reality is that much of the hostility fomented by politicians often impacts state and local election officials.
‘Unfortunately, some of that rhetoric has been targeted at the election community and the election processes,’ Barton said. ‘And the average election worker is the one that ends up bearing the brunt of this.’