(CNN)"I am a hunter -- and I think you should be hunted," a woman can be heard saying in a

voicemail left for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in September. "You will never be safe
in Arizona again."

Or there's the man who spit, "Die you bitch, die! Die you bitch, die!" repeatedly into the phone,
in another of several dozen threatening and angry voicemails directed at the Democratic
secretary of state and shared exclusively with CNN by her office.
Officials and aides in secretary of state offices in Arizona and other states targeted by former
President Donald Trump in his attack on last year's election results told CNN about living in
constant terror -- nervously watching the people around them at events, checking in their
rearview mirrors for cars following them home and sitting up at night wondering what might
happen next. 

They defended the 2020 election against Trump's lies. Now they are running for higher office in
states that could decide 2024
Law enforcement has never had to think much about protecting secretaries of state, let alone
allocating hundreds of thousands of dollars in security, tracking and follow-up. Their jobs used
to be mundane, unexciting, bureaucratic. These are small offices in a handful of states with
enormous power in administering elections, from mailing ballots to overseeing voting machines
to keeping track of counted votes. 
None were prepared to be publicly attacked. They don't have the budgets to monitor threats, and
certainly not to suddenly protect officials who never had to be protected before. No systems were
in place on the state or federal level to back them up, and the Department of Justice admits that
the federal government doesn't yet have the infrastructure to handle the situation. 
Staff members in the offices say they're dealing with long-term emotional and psychological
trauma after a year of constant threats -- in person and virtually -- to the secretaries and to
themselves. 

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has received threatening and agry voicemails.
"Bullet," read one tweet reply to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, in
September. "That is a six letter word for you." 
An email sent to her office over the summer read: "I'm really jonzing to see your purple face
after you've been hanged."
Asked by CNN last week if she feels safe in her job and going about her days, Griswold paused
for nearly 30 seconds before answering. 
 "I take these threats very seriously," she finally said, choosing her words carefully. "It's
absolutely getting worse," she added.
The threats come in from their home states and across the country. Few appear to be coordinated
or organized, and are instead often driven by momentary, angry reactions to a news story or
social media post. But some get very specific, citing details and specifics that leave the
secretaries and their staff rushing to report them to authorities.
Most anticipate the threats will increase going into next year, with Republicans around the
country making election doubt conspiracies a central plank of their campaigns, and with many of
these secretaries of state up for reelection themselves in races that are already generating more
attention than ever before, with expectations that they will be the frontlines of potentially trying
to overturn the next presidential election. 
But Griswold's problem was, ironically, summed up in one of the tweets her office has tracked:
"Your security detail is far too thin and incompetent to protect you. This world is unpredictable
these days... anything can happen to anyone." It ended with a shrug emoji. Griswold's
vulnerability is greater than that person imagined: for now, she's had to contract private security,
and only for official events, squeezing the money out of her small office budget. With all that's
been coming at her, that's what she has.

Little protection 
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who says the threats are getting worse, has asked for
more protection. 
Griswold told Gov. Jared Polis, a fellow Democrat, she needs more protection. But so far, he has
not allocated resources for it. State police protected Griswold for two weeks, then stopped, and
shelved an investigation into the threats. The governor's office and the state police did not
respond to requests for comment. A state ethics board denied her request to raise outside money
for security, arguing that this could lead to an improper mixing of political and government
activities. The state police, according to Neil Reiff of the Democratic Association of Secretaries
for State, has not provided Griswold security because the threats haven't met the threshold for
state police support.
In the meantime, Griswold moves between frustration and fear, asking why her state government
and others, as well as the federal authorities, aren't moving more quickly to address the threats
that she argues are particularly intense for her and her female colleagues in 2020 battleground
states. Constantly on edge, she's tried to keep up a normal schedule in her job, in political activity
and in her personal life. Every day she makes decisions about how much, and what she can do. 
"When I'm at the center of a national QAnon conspiracy and the very people who have stormed
the Capitol are threatening me, it is very concerning. When someone says they know where I live
and I should be afraid for my life, I take that as a threat and I believe the state of Colorado
should, too," Griswold said. 
The situation got so bad for Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's Democratic secretary of state, that
during periods when the threats against her have spiked and gotten specific, she has received
periodic 24-hour police protection. But when that security dropped off, the threats continued.
Benson had dozens of people show up outside her house last December while she sat inside with
 her husband and young son, on the phone with the Michigan attorney general who was trying to
scramble a police response. It ended up taking authorities 45 minutes to arrive on scene. 
This has become her life. "It creates an air of apprehension everywhere you go and over
everything you do. You're always looking behind your back and over your shoulder," she said. 
Asked if she feels safe, Benson said, "Sometimes." And that's mostly because it's been a year
since the last election and a year until the next one. She said she's worried because there have not
been more arrests. "The lack of accountability means one thing: we have to anticipate that it will
continue, and then as we close in on next year's election and 2024, I think it will simply continue
to escalate, unless there are real consequences."

'I didn't feel comfortable walking the dog on the

street'
Kathy Boockvar, seen here during a November 2020 news conference when she was
Pennsylvania secretary of state, said she felt so unsafe she had to leave her home and stay
elsewhere. 
Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat who was Pennsylvania's secretary of state until February, received
protection that began the week before the election last November, at the urging of her staff and
state capitol police. But the threats against her ramped up significantly after she certified the
election for Joe Biden later that month, as Trump and his allies attempted to make Pennsylvania
the first major battleground for his election lies. 
Protests against Boockvar were announced on the right-wing social media website Parler. 
"You crooked f**king bitch. You're done," said one man who left Boockvar a voice mail that
was shared with CNN. 
Boockvar and her husband felt unsafe at home and decided to stay elsewhere. Multiple police
jurisdictions were involved in helping provide protection to Boockvar as the threats continued,
she said.
"I didn't feel comfortable walking the dog on the street," she told CNN.
Boockvar resigned for reasons unrelated to the election, and though the threats mostly died down
in the months since, they haven't gone away completely: threats against her still occasionally pop
up. 
The threats aren't only toward Democrats, or women. Brad Raffensperger, the Republican
secretary of state in Georgia whom Trump has both privately pressured and publicly singled out
for not overturning the election results in his favor, has been inundated with threats since the
November election, including those directed at his wife and family.
Raffensperger told CNN he's frustrated with elected officials allied with Trump who have
continued to spread the former President's lies about the election being stolen -- lies that prompt
Trump's supporters to direct their anger toward officials like Raffensperger. Trump
has endorsedGOP Rep. Jody Hice, who has backed his baseless claims of election fraud, against
Raffensperger in next year's primary. 
"Some people have made comments that, 'It comes with the territory.' I find that beyond the
pale," Raffensperger said. "What you're talking about is not just myself, but you're also talking
about my wife, my daughter-in-law, my family."
 Raffensperger said he's seen more action recently from law enforcement in response to the
threats to election workers. He was told that the FBI had knocked on the doors of individuals in
Alabama and the Midwest as part of investigations into those who had sent him threats. A
spokesman for the FBI's Atlanta field office declined to comment on any investigations into
threats against Raffensperger.
No one has been arrested in relation to threats made toward Raffensperger, however.
Several other officials declined requests to speak about their experiences, telling CNN through
representatives either that they have been advised by security teams not to risk calling more
attention to their vulnerabilities or because they were too shaken by the experiences to discuss
what they've been through publicly. Many have had to rely on makeshift threat monitoring on
their own. In Colorado and California, for example, the secretary of state offices had already
been following chatter about attacks on election infrastructure on the dark web. Now that has
been expanded to include following chatter about security threats to the officials themselves. But
without funding to do this, employees without security training are doing it on a part-time basis,
hoping to catch what they can and properly assess when they do.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's secretary of state, says he's frustrated with elected officials allied
with Trump who have spread the former President's election lies.

A recognition that the response has been

inadequate
The Justice Department launched a new task force this summer to address the rise in threats to
election officials. But there are concerns that it's not prepared to do enough. 
John Keller, the head of the task force and principal deputy chief of the department's Public
Integrity Section, told the National Association of Secretaries of State summer meeting in
August that "there's recognition that in this last election cycle, there was a greater number of
election related threats than this country has ever seen before," adding, "there's also a recognition
that the response has been inadequate." 
The presentation followed a cheery video of an astronaut on the International Space Station,
talking up how easy it was to vote by mail. 
When Griswold voiced her concerns directly, asking what's being done to track threats to
officials like her on social media, Keller responded, "just as it is overwhelming for you,
especially doing that on a national scale, there is not an infrastructure set up yet to do a full
national ongoing review of anything potentially threatening in the election space." 
Griswold had suggested DOJ start by just monitoring the social media accounts of her and others
who have faced the most intense responses. Keller gave the secretaries of state an 800-number
and website to report threats, and he encouraged them to reach out to their local FBI offices.
Aides have spent months forwarding threats to the FBI and their local authorities. But amidst
incoming threats, their feelings of security and support come and go. 

FBI ramps up investigations of threats against election officials

"People are potentially spiraling out of control," Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a
Democrat, warned Keller at the event, asking for more help. Officials in several offices tell CNN
 they feel like they're in what they describe as a victim-blaming circle, with law enforcement
saying they can't help them because the offices can't keep up with all the information and get it to
the authorities. 
Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray told more than 1,400 election
workers during a virtual discussion in August that Wray had directed FBI agents in all 56 field
offices to work with state and local elections officials about threats. Last month, DOJ held a
training with FBI agents and assistant US attorneys across the country who are focusing
on election crime enforcement.
"We are, of course, under no illusions that our expressions of concern and assignment of law
enforcement resources has solved this problem," Garland said in August. 
A Justice Department spokesman said that the task force was collecting and analyzing
information that's reported to try to develop nationwide trends related to common tactics and
actors, including whether threats are coming through text messages, voice mails, calls or social
media. The spokesman said DOJ was committed to ensuring that all threats to election officials
and workers were assessed, including victim outreach and FBI intervention when warranted.
"Threats against election workers have historically been handled primarily as a state or local
matter, usually without significant federal involvement," Keller said in a statement to CNN.
"This is changing rapidly in response to the surge in threats nationwide since the last election
cycle. The Justice Department is now supplementing state and local efforts with resources,
national coordination, training and intelligence, as well as specially designated federal agents and
prosecutors in every jurisdiction in the country."
Part of what the secretaries are facing is the line law enforcement tends to draw in assessing a
threat: a person fantasizing about how great it would be to see an official get hurt is seen as
protected under free speech, and isn't the same as a person laying out a specific threat for how
and when to hurt an official. That's not much comfort to Griswold. "I realize that most of it is
probably bluster, but what's concerning is the one time it's not," she said.
A Reuters analysis last month found that out of 102 threats of death or violence made against
election officials, it could only confirm four had led to arrests. 
Griswold said that in addition to the safety concerns for her and her counterparts, as much as
40% of election and poll workers in Colorado have so far said they won't be returning to the job
out of their own fears. Other states are seeing drop-offs too. Nearly one in three local election
workers said they felt unsafe because of their jobs, according to an April survey on behalf of the
Brennan Center for Justice, with about 17% of those who responded saying they had received
threats. 
The Biden administration on Tuesday announced Washington state Secretary of State Kim
Wyman, a Republican who criticized Trump's election lies, would lead the Department of
Homeland Security's efforts to defend election systems from foreign and domestic interference,
though that's separate from protecting election officials from threats of violence.
In the face of what is expected to be growing threats, these officials are trying to stay optimistic
and determined about their duties. It hasn't been easy.
Hobbs is running for governor of Arizona next year, and taunting her over her administration of
last year's election has become a central part of the campaign against her. "I think she should be
locked up," said Republican candidate Kari Lake, who's endorsed by both Trump and chief
election fabulist Mike Lindell, at an event in Arizona earlier this month. 
And the threats kept pouring in.
"To say that we shouldn't be taking it seriously is missing what is going on in this nation. And
what is going on in this nation is the dismantling of democracy," Griswold said. "And threats to
election workers and those of us who are fighting to stop a political party from tilting future
elections in their favor to steal these seats is part of it."

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