Some states have additionally moved to move new legal guidelines or strengthen present ones.
“There’s a typical denominator in lots of of those circumstances: election denialists saying an intent to violently punish those that they consider have wronged them,” Gary M. Restaino, the U.S. legal professional in Arizona, informed reporters final month when he introduced {that a} decide had sentenced an Ohio man, Joshua Russell, 46, to 30 months in jail for sending dying threats to Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state, between August and November 2022.
In an apology letter to Ms. Hobbs, now the Arizona governor, Mr. Russell, from Bucyrus, Ohio, stated he had been appearing on disinformation he had consumed with out vetting its accuracy.
“I began calling public officers whom I discovered disgusting,” he wrote to Ms. Hobbs. After the F.B.I. raided his residence and charged him, he stated, “I’ve by no means felt so silly and ashamed.”
Maybe the best-known instance of disinformation resulting in threats is what occurred to 2 Georgia election employees, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, after Election Day 2020. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who on the time Mr. Trump’s private lawyer, publicly accused the ladies of collaborating in election fraud, resulting in a torrent of threats in opposition to them. (The ladies received a defamation go well with in opposition to Mr. Giuliani final yr, with the jury discovering that he ought to pay $148 million in damages, which despatched him on to chapter court docket.)
Simply one of many greater than 400 threats Ms. Freeman obtained resulted in a prosecution, in accordance with an individual conversant in the case. The defendant, Chad Christopher Stark, 55, of Leander, Texas, was charged with threatening one other Georgia official as nicely and obtained a two-year jail sentence.