Women run 80% of US elections – but are targets of misogyny-laced threats

Carly Koppes kept her pregnancy hidden from the public as long as she possibly could, fearing the potential harassment that could come from those who frequently attack the Republican elections clerk.

When Koppes, who runs elections in Weld county, Colorado, did media interviews, she asked the people behind the camera to position her so her growing belly wasn’t visible, fearing her harassers would see the images or videos and make comments about her future child. She “never in a million years” anticipated that she’d have to hide her pregnancy, she said.

Related: Exclusive: Georgia lawmaker runs secret election-conspiracy Telegram channel

Sure enough, once it was public, she received messages like, “I’m going to pray for your child because his mother’s a demon,” she said.

“I’m happy to report, he did not come out with horns, he came out looking more like a cherub angel,” she joked. “So thank you for the prayers, they clearly worked.”

Koppes is part of the 80% – the percentage of women who run elections in the US, one area of government that is consistently female-dominated. It’s also an area of government that, since 2020, has seen a persistent level of threats and harassment, largely from those who believe Donald Trump won the election that year. Women in elected positions, in general, report higher levels of threats and harassment than their male counterparts, and people of color experience higher levels than their white counterparts.

Anecdotally, women who run elections say they have encountered sexist insults, threats of sexual or domestic violence, attacks on their families and criticisms that they aren’t able to do their jobs.

While the individual harm of these behaviors is clear, there’s also a societal harm – they could run women out of their offices, affecting the pipeline for higher offices and threatening the functioning of democracy itself.

“The health of democracy is literally built on political discourse, where people, even those without power, are discussing even sensitive topics, and they can share their ideas and opinions and experiences,” said Sarah Sobieraj, a professor at Tufts University who has studied and written about abuse and harassment of public officials. “And when we lose those varied voices and perspectives, this shapes, literally, what we are able to know.”

What it’s like to face threats

Koppes made changes to her daily life to work around the harassment and ensure her safety, especially since a source of frequent harassing messages lives across the street from her office. She parks in a different spot each day, and she arrives and leaves at different times. It’s become a running joke among her staff that she’s out wandering around the parking lot again, looking for her car. The individual who lives nearby can’t be prevented from coming into the building she works in because the building also handles things like licenses, so she gets a heads up whenever he comes around.

She also takes precautions to keep her child off social media, asking friends and family not to post photos from birthdays or holidays. The harassment comes in waves, and she expects more of it after this year’s elections.

“After the 2020 election, in early 2021, the gentleman who actually does live across the street from my office did take a picture of … my horses and got a little creative with it,” said Koppes, a former rodeo queen who owns horses. “And I just don’t want to see that creativity done to a picture of my child.”

Koppes isn’t sure whether she receives the harassment because she’s a woman or because she’s a Republican standing up to her own party, or both. But, she said on a panel discussion about women running elections hosted by Issue One, she seems to face more derogatory remarks and get less respect than her male counterparts.

Koppes, who has practiced karate since age three and has family who have worked in politics and elections, isn’t easily intimidated. She knows she’s on the right side, so backing down in the face of harassment from her fellow Republicans isn’t an option. She keeps a good sense of humor, despite the unwanted attention. And she’s glad at least that so many more people are engaged in elections, even if some of them take it too far.

“I’ve been told I have a cell waiting for me at Guantánamo Bay,” she said. “They tell me, it’s not [just] crimes, I’ve committed war crimes.”

Kathy Boockvar, the former secretary of state in Pennsylvania, became way too familiar with slurs as a frequent target of rightwing harassers when she served in the role from 2019 to 2021.

“‘Cunt’ and ‘whore’ played a bigger role in every threatening communication that I ever got,” she said. “[There’s] not even really equivalent male-gendered words. It was a constant, constant use of those words. ‘Die, communist whore’, ‘cunt’, ‘bitch’, ‘burn in hell, bitch’, ‘you crooked fucking bitch’ were certainly very common.

“And then, with the antisemitic stuff, they would add in, ‘hook-nose bitch’, ‘frizzy-haired cunt’,” she said. “Look at the history of how women are made to feel vulnerable, particularly by men who want to provide evidence of their power. That’s what they do. They will use disgusting obscenities, graphic messages and lump in as much misogyny as they can.”

Boockvar had to leave her home, first for a week, and be driven by law enforcement or former law enforcement officers whenever she had to go somewhere. She then stayed at the governor’s residence for more than a month because it had 24/7 protection. She was advised not to stay alone in her apartment when she traveled to Harrisburg for work. To walk the dog, she wore hats and scarves to hide her identity.

Her mother and daughter faced threats, too. One of the worst instances, she said, happened after she left office. Someone reached out to her adult daughter in 2022 and called her a “stupid fucking whore” and said her life was going to get really hard because of her mother’s actions, Boockvar said.

“That was in 2022, two years after the fact of the 2020 election,” Boockvar said. “It’s, again, using that same language – intentionally misogynistic, making a woman in particular feel vulnerable and unsafe in a very different way than I think it’s typically done against men.”

Why women run elections

The preponderance of women in elections roles is rare in government and politics. The 80% number comes from a 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College survey of local elections officials. Researchers there posit that these roles were traditionally seen as more clerical and delegated to women. They also could be one way that local party leaders let women “through the gate” into elected office, because the roles didn’t typically translate into higher office. Some in the survey said that their roles allowed them to better manage work and home life.

Koppes said a penchant for being detail-oriented and focused on the community make elections a good fit for women. Boockvar said something similar about attention to detail and being nurturing and dedicated to the community. But, she added, elections have been historically underpaid and understaffed, and she’s not sure which way the causation of women running their offices goes.

The Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University, along with CivicPulse, has conducted surveys of people in local offices who have reported an “unacceptably high baseline of threats and harassment”, but there is a significant difference between the experiences of men and women in these local elected offices, said Shannon Hiller, the initiative’s executive director.

“Even when you control for other factors, like political party or like the size of the locality, women remain significantly more likely to report being insulted, harassed or threatened while in office,” Hiller said.

A survey of state and local officeholders of all kinds, not just elections, by the Brennan Center for Justice found that larger shares of women experienced increased severity in abuse over the last few years and were three to four times as likely as men to experience gendered abuse. People of color were also more likely to face racially based abuse than their white counterparts. Women and people of color also saw their families brought into the abuse at higher rates.

While about 40% of local officials were less willing to seek office again because of the abuse, the rates were higher among women, about half of whom said they were less likely to stay in public office, the Brennan Center reported.

In elections roles, in particular, the exodus is real: a recently released study by the Bipartisan Policy Center showed that turnover in elections positions had increased steadily over the past two decades, with 39% of jurisdictions having a new person in charge in 2022. The report said this increase could be a combination of increased hostility, increasing complexity of the job and an ageing workforce.

Men who oversee elections have shared how the women in their lives have faced threats as well. Bill Gates, a county supervisor in Maricopa county, Arizona, has endured years of threats and harassment. In one instance, someone wrote online that “his daughters should be raped”, according to the Washington Post. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, publicly shared that his wife had received “disgusting” and “vulgar” threats. His daughter-in-law’s home was broken into in an incident Raffensperger believes was targeted to intimidate him, Reuters reported.

“Isn’t it interesting that, where we have these male colleagues doing the right thing, when the threats come up, and the harassment comes up, yes, of course it is against them, but it’s also against the women in their lives?” Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the New Mexico secretary of state, said on an Issue One panel about women and democracy last month. “And that is extremely, obviously wrong. And it just paints that picture just a little bit more right about where they think we as election officials are vulnerable.”

The sexist attacks on election officials and their families come from “the grounds that their very identities are unacceptable”, not their ideas or policies, Sobieraj, the professor, said. Their bodies often become part of the commentary as well. And while these comments seem personal, they are also often pretty generic, she said.

“Even though the abuse and harassment really looks and feels like bullying or interpersonal backlash, it’s really a structural rage that’s based in hostility toward the voice and visibility of these speakers as representatives of groups of people,” Sobieraj said.