Anticipating Violence Post-election, D.C. Enacts New Protections for Poll Workers
November 10, 2024
By: Megan Killpatrick
In the fallout of the 2020 presidential election, Washington D.C. had a front-row seat to the violence of January 6th, 2021. In response to this chaos and in advance of the 2024 presidential election, the Council of the District of Columbia announced in early 2024 that they had enacted new measures in an attempt to prevent violence against election workers by increasing the penalty for crimes targeting these public servants.
The legislation comes after an alarming rise in threats against poll workers. In a May 2024 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice, a whopping 38% of election workers reported being harassed, abused, or threatened because of their job.
Due to the unique legislative process of D.C.’s governing body (which, for example, requires approval from both D.C.’s mayor and satisfactory completion of a period of Congressional Review in order for a bill to become a law), the D.C. Council utilized emergency and temporary legislation, which do not require congressional review, to enact the new protections in time for the 2024 election. The temporary legislation will remain in place until after the 2024 election, giving the Council the time to consider legislation adopting these protections permanently.
In the emergency declaration accompanying the emergency and temporary legislation, the Council stated that by February of 2024, the D.C. Board of Elections had already received numerous threats, including vandalism of the Board’s offices. The Council additionally predicted that “[t]he hotly contested 2024 elections will bring a predictable increase in the abuse of our election officials and poll workers.”
The D.C. Board of Elections, too, is preparing for the potential of a repeat of January 6th-esque violence. Spokesperson Sarah Graham recently told Axios that the Board will have armed guards at their office on Election Night, and will “remain on high alert for any potential threats” at the polls. In the Brennan Center’s survey of poll workers, 92% reported that their offices have taken similar steps to increase election security measures.
At the same time that D.C. legislators and election officials have increasingly focused on election security, a ballot measure seeks to fundamentally change the way that D.C. conducts its elections. If passed, Initiative 83 would create semi-open primaries and allow for ranked choice voting. These changes would allow registered independents to vote in either the democratic or republican party primaries, and give all voters the option to rank their top five candidates in electoral contests. In ranked choice voting, if no candidate wins a majority of “first-preference” votes, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated, and each of their votes is distributed to the next-highest ranked candidate. This process continues until a candidate obtains a majority of votes, at which time that candidate is declared the winner.
Efforts to enact ranked-choice voting systems have created division among Democrats and Republicans alike. According to FairVote, a nonpartisan organization focused on electoral reform and advocate for ranked choice voting, D.C. would join 50 other American jurisdictions (including 2 states, 3 counties, and 45 cities) if the initiative passes.