‘Gutted’: What Happened to a Georgia Elections Office Targeted by People Who Believe the 2020 Election Was a Fraud
ROME, Ga. - The interim election supervisor took a seat all the way to one side of the meeting room, her back against the wood-paneled wall, a position near the police officers and a few steps from an exit. Knowing what was about to happen, Vanessa Waddell raised her cellphone and began recording.
She zoomed in on the county commissioners who were about to name a new election board, sweeping away a system based on civic-minded volunteers and mutual trust and replacing it with one controlled by people claiming that fraud had corrupted the 2020 presidential election. She panned around the room and here were the people who’d been pushing to oust the old system, believing that the corruption had seeped all the way down to their very own election office, casting Waddell as a pawn in a conspiracy stretching to China. And now she noticed someone new, a young man in grease-stained boots, and she wondered whether he might be the one who’d sent her an email that had read in part: “We’ll make the Boston bombings look like child’s play at the poll sites in this county… . You’ve been warned. We will end you all.”