The dangerous life of a Georgia election official • Georgia Recorder

Editor’s note: This story contains profanity and racial slurs.

When Milton Kidd leaves work at the end of the day, he sneaks out the domed back door of the Douglas County Courthouse, avoiding the public entrance where people might insult him or ask for his home address.

He never takes the same route home two days in a row and makes random turns to avoid being followed.

Kidd, a black man, has a very dangerous job: he is the elections and voter registration director for Douglas County.

“Milton Kidd is a disgusting n***** who lives like a scumbag living off taxpayer money,” one voter wrote in an email Kidd shared with Stateline. “He lives off taxpayer money like a low IQ piece of s***.”

Another resident of Kidds County, population 149,000 west of Atlanta, left him a voicemail.

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Milton, but the American people have set a precedent for what they do to damn tyrants and oppressors who hold government office,” the caller said. “Yeah, in the 18th century they were called the British, and the damn American people got so sick of the damn British acting like idiots like you, and they just killed all the damn British.”

Kidd smiled in disbelief as he talked about his security program and the hateful messages that inspired it. He is speechless that he is the target of such vitriol for conducting the 2024 election – but he knows where it comes from.

The lies of former President Donald Trump, who is impeached for trying to pressure Georgia authorities to change the 2020 results, have resonated with many voters in Douglas County, Kidd said. Now this bipartisan official, like many others across the country, must face their wrath.

“The idea that this decision has become so deeply ingrained in the American mindset because one individual failed to win an election is insidious,” says Kidd, who has a thick beard and wears a thumb-sized crystal on a black band around his neck.

As he prepares for the next presidential election, he will continue to push his state’s elected officials to give them more leadership and money to protect him, his staff and the democratic process, Kidd said.

“If this office fails, then our democracy will fail,” he said. “I will never allow a critic who attacks me with the most vile language to stop me from doing my job.”

Like standing in a puddle of petrol

Kidd is far from the only election official who has faced threats due to lies from Trump and his allies, who continue to claim without evidence that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

According to a survey released in May by the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights nonprofit at New York University School of Law, 38% of local election officials nationwide have been threatened, harassed or verbally abused since 2020 just for doing their jobs. More than half of the more than 900 respondents said they were concerned about the safety of their colleagues and staff.

Kidd’s colleagues in neighboring counties also felt the hostility.

In the green hills of Bartow County, a rural community in northwest Georgia, Elections Supervisor Joseph Kirk has taken steps to protect himself but declined to give details. While the harassment has not reached the levels seen in other counties, he has lost staff who have left their jobs because of the changed atmosphere, he said.

“The hostility is much greater now,” he said in his office in Cartersville, a red brick building 4 miles from Main Street.

Cobb County Elections Supervisor Tate Fall is also beefing up her elections office in suburban Atlanta. In the coming weeks, her office will install a shatter-proof security film on the glass that shields the reception desk. Additional access points will require key cards, and there will be additional panic buttons.

“It’s completely surreal,” she said. “In the office, people are so desensitized to yelling that they don’t even see things as a threat anymore.”

At least a dozen states have enacted new protections for local election officials in recent years, including tougher penalties for those who threaten or harass them.

This month, Georgia state authorities became the first in the country to announce a requirement that all new police officers complete an election security course that focuses, among other things, on protecting election officials from threats.

This is part of a broader mission to improve coordination between sheriff’s offices and election offices, said Chris Harvey, deputy executive director of the Georgia Police Officer Training and Standards Council, which will lead the initiative.

Harvey, a former detective, also served as Georgia’s state elections director for six years, including until the 2020 presidential election.

After the US Senate runoff election in January 2021, he came under suspicion – his home address and a picture of his house were posted online. He also received a death threat via email that included a photo of him with crosshairs over his face.

He said he wasn’t worried about his safety, but he was afraid for his wife and four children at home. He called local police, who stationed a car outside his house for two weeks.

“In this high-voltage environment, it’s like standing in a puddle of gasoline,” he told Stateline. “Anything can set it off. It wasn’t like that before.”

The democratic path

The fragile promise of democracy has always been part of Kidd’s life.

Kidd, 39, grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois, a former industrial center of 18,000 residents on the Mississippi River.

His family was part of the Great Migration, moving north from southern states like Arkansas and Mississippi in search of work and safety. But soon after his ancestors arrived, white mobs killed hundreds of black newcomers over the course of several months in 1917, driving 6,000 blacks out of the southern Illinois city.

His grandmother was a sharecropper in Luxor, Arkansas, and impressed upon his mother the importance of voting. Growing up, he heard stories about civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten for registering voters, and Medgar Evers, who was murdered. Through this, Kidd learned history and was able to recite the Declaration of Independence and parts of the Constitution.

“The importance of the ballot box has been brought home to me time and time again,” he said. “I know that in my own family, people have tried to register to vote and then been attacked by dogs. Those are not words that are written in a book. It’s not that far-fetched.”

Inspired by his father, who left school in ninth grade to work, and his mother, who pursued a college education later in life, Kidd earned his master’s degree in public administration from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2010.

He then made a “reverse migration” back south to work as a poll worker in various counties in the Atlanta metropolitan area, including Douglas County, where he began in 2015 and was promoted to chief of the office three years later.

During this time, Kidd witnessed the electoral climate becoming increasingly unfavorable.

“We have transformed this nation into an uglier, more vile and more spiteful spirit that we simply allow to continue to manifest itself,” he said last month.

He and his eight full-time staff have tried to build their public image by visiting local churches, masses and party meetings of both parties to share details about their election operations and the secure counting of votes.

But he needs more funding from the state. The same lawmakers who wink at the lie that massive voter fraud is voter fraud do not support additional funding for local election administration, he said, especially for election officials’ security.