MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) — The election director in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb where votes will be fiercely contested in this year’s presidential race, recently organized a five-hour training session. The focus wasn’t solely on the nuts and bolts of running this year’s election. Instead, it brought together election staff and law enforcement to strategize on how to keep workers safe and the process of voting and ballot-counting secure.

Having a local sheriff’s deputy at early voting locations and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher are among the added security steps the office is taking this year.

Tate Fall, Cobb County’s election director, said she was motivated to act after hearing one of her poll workers describe being confronted during the state’s presidential primary in March by an agitated voter who the worker noticed was carrying a gun. The situation ended peacefully, but the poll worker was shaken.

“That made it really real for me — that it’s so easy for something to go sideways in life, period, let alone the environment of Georgia and elections,” Fall said. “I just can’t have someone being harmed on my conscience.”

Across the country, local election directors are beefing up their security in advance of Election Day on Nov. 5 to keep their workers and polling places safe while also ensuring that ballots and voting procedures won’t be tampered with. Their concern isn’t just theoretical. Election offices and those who run them have been targets of harassment and even death threats since the 2020 presidential election, primarily by people acting on former President Donald Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him through widespread fraud or rigged voting machines.

The focus on security comes as threats of political violence have been on the rise. Trump was the target of a potential assassination attempt over the weekend, just nine weeks after another threat on his life. Federal agents last year fatally shot a Trump supporter who threatened to assassinate President Joe Biden, and the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was severely injured in a hammer attack by a man promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.

In just the last year, a gun was fired at a window of the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, election office, bogus 911 calls were made to the homes of top state election officials in Georgia, Maine, Michigan and Missouri in a potentially dangerous situation known as swatting, and election offices in multiple states were sent letters filled with a white powder that in some cases tested positive for the powerful opioid fentanyl. On Tuesday, the FBI and U.S. Postal Service said they were investigating suspicious packages received by election officials in at least a dozen states, although there was no indication any of them contained hazardous substances.

“This is one of the things that I have to say is just crazy, outrageous to me — the election threats to workers of both parties and their families, the bullying, the harassment,” Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, said during a recent agency-sponsored online event. “These folks, they are not doing it for pay. They’re not doing it for glory. They’re doing it because they believe it’s the right thing to do to defend our democracy.”

Her agency has completed more than 1,000 voluntary physical security assessments for election offices since the start of 2023. Election officials have been using that help to identify gaps and request money from their local governments to make upgrades.

They also have been aided by a U.S. Election Assistance Commission decision in 2022 that allowed certain federal money to go toward security features such as badge readers, cameras and protective fencing.

California’s Los Angeles County and Durham County, North Carolina, will have new offices with significant security upgrades for this year’s election. They include bulletproof glass, security cameras and doors that open only with badges. Election workers across the country also will have new procedures for handling mail, including kits of Narcan, the nasal spray used for accidental overdoses.

In Durham County, a central feature of the new office will be a mail processing room with a separate exhaust system to contain potentially hazardous substances sent in the mail.

“We have countless reasons why this investment was critical,” said the county’s election director, Derek Bowens, pointing to threats against election officials in Michigan and Arizona and the suspicious letters sent to offices in Oregon, Washington, California and Georgia.

Bowens and others who have worked in elections for years said their jobs have changed significantly. Threats and harassment are one reason why some election officials across the country have been leaving. In some places, election workers are being trained in de-escalation techniques and how to respond to an active shooter.

“Security to this extent wasn’t on the list before. Now it is,” said Cari-Ann Burgess, the chief election official in Washoe County, Nevada. “We have drills that we work through, we have emergency plans that we have prepared. We are a lot more cautious now than we ever have been.”

In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, about a four-hour drive from where Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in July, election officials estimate they now spend about 40% of their time on security and working with local law enforcement and emergency managers on election plans. This involves regular trainings to prepare for anything that might interfere with voting or counting ballots.

“It’s very volatile, and Luzerne County reflects what is going on across the country” said County Manager Romilda Crocamo, who oversees the election office staff. “It seems that people are very emotional, and sometimes that emotion escalates.”

Crocamo is considering purchasing panic buttons for poll managers who will be at some 130 voting locations throughout the county on Election Day. State law in Pennsylvania prohibits law enforcement from being inside polling locations, but Crocamo and her team are speaking with local officials about having emergency responders with their radios at the sites should something happen.

Many local officials said they have increased the law enforcement presence at election offices, including on election night when poll workers are bringing in ballots and other material from voting locations. Added law enforcement also is planned in the weeks after Election Day, during the canvass of the votes and certifying the results.

In Los Angeles, law enforcement canine teams will be helping scan incoming mail ballots for suspicious substances. It’s part of an updated approach that includes a new $29 million election office that consolidates operations that previously had been spread across the county.

Dean Logan, who oversees elections for Los Angeles County, said security remains a top concern. He pointed to social media posts suggesting ways to damage ballot drop boxes and hamper mail voting. He said the letters with white powder were designed to disrupt election operations, and it’s the responsibility of election officials to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The office will have round-the-clock security and additional staffing from the county sheriff’s department for the November election.

“It’s important to me that we can tell voters they don’t have to be worried about the security of their ballots,” he said. “We’ve taken steps to keep them safe.”

Election officials say security is a balancing act, ensuring safety while making sure polling places are welcoming spaces for voters and providing enough access to election offices so the public can trust the process.

In Michigan four years ago, a large crowd of Trump supporters created a tense and chaotic scene when they gathered outside Detroit’s ballot counting operation the day after the election, chanting “Stop the count!” as they banged on the windows and demanded access.

Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said her office is much better prepared this time, with more cameras, armed security and bulletproof glass. Observers will now be checked in and screened by security outside a large room used for counting ballots at the city’s convention center.

“My biggest concern was to protect the staff and the process,” Winfrey said. “And in doing so, our building — it may look the same, but it’s not the same.”

The letter sent by nearly two dozen computer scientists, election security experts and voter advocacy organizations asks for a federal probe and a risk assessment of voting machines used throughout the country, saying the software breaches have “urgent implications for the 2024 election and beyond.” The breaches affected voting equipment made by two companies that together count over 70% of the votes cast across the country, according to the letter.

“The multistate effort to unlawfully obtain copies of voting system software poses serious threats to election security and national security and constitutes a potential criminal conspiracy of enormous consequences,” the group wrote in a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “We must protect our most sacred tenet of democracy — the security of our vote.”

The letter, sent to the agencies late Monday, was organized by the left-leaning group Free Speech for People, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on election and campaign finance reforms. The group also has filed challenges in a handful of states seeking to ban Trump from the ballot in 2024 under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The FBI declined to comment on the letter Tuesday while the other offices did not provide an immediate response.

Trump’s loss in the 2020 election helped fuel unfounded conspiracy theories around voting machines that in turn led to threats against election workers, a push in many conservative counties to hand-count ballots and defamation lawsuits by companies that make the equipment. Authorities in three states — Colorado, Georgia and Michigan — have charged people in connection with breaches at local election offices, but there has been no public indication of a federal probe.

The letter sent this week outlines what is known publicly about the efforts to access those voting systems, which began in the weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden. It cites a Dec. 18, 2020, meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump allies, including lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, discussed a desire to access voting machines in presidential swing states Trump lost, according to congressional testimony. It also details subsequent efforts to secure that access.

Powell, Giuliani and Trump were among 19 people charged this summer in Fulton County, Georgia, where state prosecutors have alleged they were part of a conspiracy to overturn Trump’s loss in the state. That included the unauthorized breach of voting systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia.

Powell has since pleaded guilty to reduced charges and has agreed to testify against her co-defendants. Prosecutors alleged she had conspired with others to access election equipment without authorization in the county and hired a computer forensics firm to copy software and data from voting machines and computers.

The letter to federal officials cites various documents and news reports to highlight potential connections between Powell and three people charged in a similar effort in Michigan, where state prosecutors allege there was unauthorized access to ballot tabulators in three counties. Powell has not been charged in the Michigan case.

In addition to Georgia and Michigan, the letter mentions voting system breaches or attempts to access voting-related systems in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado as well as various individuals involved in the efforts. It stresses that possession of voting system software could enable people with ill intent to practice how to meddle in the 2024 election, allowing them to identify vulnerabilities and test potential attacks.

“And they could use their knowledge of the software to fabricate evidence of stolen votes, either for disinformation or to challenge election results,” the letter said.

In Colorado, former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters has pleaded not guilty to state charges alleging she was part of a “deceptive scheme” to provide unauthorized access to the county’s voting systems during a May 2021 breach that eventually resulted in a copy of the voting system hard drive being posted online.

Peters, whose trial is scheduled for next year, has said she had the authority to investigate concerns that the voting equipment had been manipulated. She has appeared at several events with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has promoted election conspiracy theories.

Federal authorities have been involved in the Colorado case, but the extent of any investigation is unknown. In September 2022, Lindell said he received a subpoena from a federal grand jury investigating the breach in Colorado and was ordered to hand over his cellphone to FBI agents.

In the Michigan case, a special prosecutor said local clerks who turned over the ballot tabulators and others who analyzed the equipment “were deceived by some of the charged defendants.” They have not been charged.

Among the 22 people who signed the letter to the federal agencies was Douglas W. Jones, a computer scientist who said the effects of the various breaches were not limited to the local election offices where they occurred because the voting system software involved is used by many offices across the country. The letter says those involved accessed equipment made by two of the leading manufacturers, Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software.

“In 2024, no matter which way the election goes, election deniers on one side or the other could easily grasp on the breaches following the 2020 election and suggest that those breaches allowed the 2024 results to be cooked,” he said.

Election technology expert Kevin Skoglund, who also signed the letter, said a federal probe was necessary because many of those involved have not been investigated or been asked to give up their copies of the election software.

“Every software copy that is reclaimed reduces the risks of further distribution, disinformation and harm to the security of future elections,” Skoglund said. “There should be consequences for widely sharing parts of our national critical infrastructure or others will be encouraged to repeat these schemes.”

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Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Authorities were hunting Thursday for whoever sent suspicious letters — including some containing fentanyl — to elections offices in at least five states this week, delaying the counting of ballots in some local races in the latest instance of threats faced by election workers around the country.

The letters were sent to elections offices in the presidential battlegrounds of Georgia and Nevada, as well as California, Oregon and Washington, with some being intercepted before they arrived. Four of the letters contained fentanyl, the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service reported in a statement to elections officials Thursday.

“Law enforcement is working diligently to intercept any additional letters before they are delivered,” the statement said.

The Pierce County auditor’s office in Tacoma, Washington, released images of the letter it received, showing it had been postmarked in Portland, Oregon, and read in part, “End elections now.”

In Seattle, King County Elections Director Julie Wise said that letter appeared to be the same one her office got — and that it was “very similar” to one King County received during the August primary, which also contained fentanyl.

Among the offices that appeared to be targeted was Fulton County in Georgia, which includes Atlanta and is the largest voting jurisdiction in one of the nation’s most important presidential swing states. Authorities were working to intercept the letter. In the meantime, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said officials were sending the overdose-reversal drug naloxone to the office as a precaution.

“This is domestic terrorism, and it needs to be condemned by anyone that holds elected office and anyone that wants to hold elective office anywhere in America,” said Raffensperger, a Republican.

In California, the United States Postal Service intercepted two suspicious envelopes that were headed to election facilities in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

Authorities in Lane County, Oregon, which includes the University of Oregon, were investigating a piece of mail that arrived at the local election office Wednesday. No one who came in contact with it had experienced any negative health effects, said Devon Ashbridge, spokeswoman for the Lane County Elections Office in Eugene.

The incident prompted officials to close the office and delayed an afternoon pickup of ballots. Ashbridge declined to provide further details.

“Someone attempted to terrorize our elections staff, and that’s not OK,” Ashbridge said.

On Wednesday, authorities in Washington state said four county election offices had to be evacuated as election workers were processing ballots cast in Tuesday’s election, delaying vote-counting.

Election offices in King, Skagit, Spokane and Pierce counties received envelopes containing powders. Local law enforcement officials said the substances in King and Spokane counties field-tested positive for fentanyl. In at least one other case, the substance was baking soda.

Pierce County Auditor Linda Farmer released images of the envelope and letter her office received. The letter contained a warning about the vulnerability of “ballot drops” and read: “End elections now. Stop giving power to the right that they don’t have. We are in charge now and there is no more need for them.”

The letter featured an antifascist symbol, a progress pride flag and a pentagram. While the symbols have sometimes been associated with leftist politics, they also have been used by conservative figures to label and stereotype the left, and the sender’s political leanings were unclear.

Elections offices in two Washington counties — King and Okanogan — also received suspicious envelopes while processing ballots during the August primary, and the letter sent to King County tested positive for traces of fentanyl. Those letters remain under investigation by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and FBI.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the incidents in his state “acts of terrorism to threaten our elections.”

White House spokeswoman Olivia Dalton said the Biden administration was aware of the investigation: “We are grateful for the election and poll workers who served this week to ensure the security of our democratic processes.”

Fentanyl, an opioid that can be 50 times as powerful as the same amount of heroin, is driving an overdose crisis deadlier than any the U.S. has ever seen as it is pressed into pills or mixed into other drugs. Briefly touching fentanyl cannot cause an overdose, and researchers have found that the risk of fatal overdose from accidental exposure is low.

Jeanmarie Perrone, director of the Center for Addiction Medicine and Policy at the University of Pennsylvania said studies simulating exposure from opening envelopes containing powders showed that very little, if any, of the powder becomes aerosolized to cause toxicity through inhalation.

She noted that factory workers in manufacturing facilities often wear some level of protective equipment, but even incidental nasal exposure has not been found to cause toxicity in those workers.

“We have really good evidence that it wouldn’t be exposed through the skin, or through inhalation,” Perrone said.

It was not immediately clear how authorities came to suspect that a letter might have been sent to Georgia’s biggest election office. Raffensperger said the state alerted all 159 of its counties of the possible threat Wednesday, but believes only Fulton County is being targeted.

It’s the latest disruption since the 2020 election to the office that oversees voting in and around Atlanta.

Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts, speaking at a news conference Thursday with Raffensperger, said the county’s election workers had been under threat since at least when two of them were singled out following the 2020 presidential election, with then-Republican President Donald Trump, attorney Rudolph Giuliani and others falsely alleging that election workers were stuffing ballots to aid Democrats. Democrat Joe Biden narrowly won the state.

Part of the Fulton County prosecution that indicted Trump, Giuliani and 17 others includes criminal charges focusing on statements and acts made against election workers.

“There’s people out there who want to do harm to our workers and want to disrupt, interrupt, the flow of democracy and free, open and transparent elections, and we’re prepared for it,” said Pitts, an elected Democrat.

Pitts said he believes that in 2024 Georgia’s most populous county will be the “focal point” of election scrutiny.

“So this was a good trial run for us, I hate to say it,” he said.

Many election offices across the United States have taken steps to increase the security of their buildings and boost protections for workers amid an onslaught of harassment and threats following the 2020 election and the false claims that it was rigged.

It’s a “sad reality” that election officials are still facing threats, said David Becker, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who works with election officials through the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“While it may be unlikely this attack would cause serious damage, it seems clearly designed to terrorize the public servants in these offices who run elections,” Becker said.

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Komenda reported from Tacoma, Washington, and Johnson from Seattle. Associated Press writers Jeff Amy in Atlanta; Ali Swenson in New York; Josh Boak in Chicago; Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia; Adam Beam in Sacramento, California; and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than a dozen people nationally have been charged with threatening election workers by a Justice Department unit trying to stem the tide of violent and graphic threats against people who count and secure the vote.

Government employees are being bombarded with threats even in normally quiet periods between elections, secretaries of state and experts warn. Some point to former President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen and spreading conspiracy theories about election workers. Experts fear the 2024 election could be worse and want the federal government to do more to protect election workers.

The Justice Department created the Election Threats Task Force in 2021 led by its public integrity section, which investigates election crimes. John Keller, the unit’s second in command, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the department hoped its prosecutions would deter others from threatening election workers.

“This isn’t going to be taken lightly. It’s not going to be trivialized,” he said. “Federal judges, the courts are taking misconduct seriously and the punishments are going to be commensurate with the seriousness of the conduct.”

Two more men pleaded guilty Thursday to threatening election workers in Arizona and Georgia in separate cases. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department would keep up the investigations, adding, “A functioning democracy requires that the public servants who administer our elections are able to do their jobs without fearing for their lives.”

The unit has filed 14 cases and two have resulted in yearslong prison sentences, including a 2 1/2-year sentence Monday for Mark Rissi, an Iowa man charged with leaving a message threatening to “lynch” and “hang” an Arizona election official. He had been “inundated with misinformation” and now “feels horrible” about the messages he left, his lawyer Anthony Knowles said.

A Texas man was given 3 1/2 years earlier this month after suggesting a “mass shooting of poll workers and election officials” last year, charges stated. In one message, the Justice Department said, the man wrote: “Someone needs to get these people AND their children. The children are the most important message to send.” His lawyer did not return a message seeking comment.

One indictment unveiled in August was against a man accused of leaving an expletive-filled voicemail after the 2020 election for Tina Barton, a Republican who formerly was the clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, outside Detroit. According to the indictment, the person vowed that “a million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it” and “we’ll … kill you.”

Barton said it was just one of many threats that left her feeling deeply anxious.

“I’m really hopeful the charges will send a strong message, and we won’t find ourselves in the same position after the next election,” she said.

Normally, the periods between elections are quiet for the workers who run voting systems around the U.S. But for many, that’s no longer true, said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat who has pushed back against conspiracy theories surrounding elections.

“I anticipate it will get worse as we end this year and go into the presidential election next year,” Griswold said.

Griswold said the threats come in “waves,” usually following social media posts by prominent figures about false claims the 2020 election was stolen or blog posts on far-right websites. While the nation is more informed about the threats to election workers, she worries that there haven’t been enough prosecutions and states haven’t taken enough action to protect workers.

“Do we have the best tools to get through the next period of time? Absolutely not,” Griswold said.

Election officials note that there have been thousands of threats nationwide yet relatively few prosecutions. They say they understand the high bar to actually prosecute a case but that more could be done.

Liz Howard, a former Virginia election official now at the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program, called on the Justice Department to hire a senior adviser with existing relationships with election officials to improve outreach.

About 1 in 5 election workers know someone who left their election job for safety reasons and 73% of local election officials said harassment has increased, according to a Brennan Center survey published in April.

The task force has reviewed more than 2,000 reports of threats and harassment across the country since its inception, though most of those cases haven’t brought charges from prosecutors who point to the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for criminal prosecution. Communication must be considered a “true threat,” one that crosses a line to a serious intent to hurt someone, in order to be a potential crime rather than free speech, Keller said.

“We are not criminalizing or frankly discouraging free speech by actions that we’re taking from a law enforcement perspective,” he said.

The task force’s work is unfolding at a time when Trump and other Republicans have accused the Biden administration of using the Justice Department to target political opponents, although the task force itself hasn’t been targeted publicly by Republicans.

Many GOP leaders have sharply criticized the federal prosecutions of Trump and of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump himself faces a federal indictment in Washington, D.C., and a state indictment in Georgia over his efforts to overturn 2020 election results. He has denied wrongdoing and said he was acting within the law. A series of federal and state investigations and dozens of lawsuits have not uncovered any evidence the election was rigged.

Trump is the front-runner for the GOP nomination for president in 2024 and continues in his speeches and online posts to argue the 2020 election was rigged.

For many election workers, the threats have been a major driving factor to leave the job, hollowing out the ranks of experience ahead of 2024, said Dokhi Fassihian, the deputy chief of strategy and program at Issue One, a nonpartisan reform group representing election officials.

About 1 in 5 election officials in 2024 will have begun service after the 2020 election, the Brennan Center survey found.

“Many are deciding it’s just not worth it to stay,” Fassihian said.

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Cassidy reported from Atlanta. AP Director of Public Opinion Research Emily Swanson in Washington contributed to this report.