Officials in some states refused to confirm threats against their election workers, worrying that acknowledging them would only make the problem worse. But published reports of election-related threats and harassment have risen steadily in recent weeks. And in interviews, a number of state and local election officials have said that the volume of intimidating communications from outsiders — some of whom even identify themselves — was unprecedented.
Among the targets, according to interviews and news reports, are officials in battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, as well as election officers in less-contested states like Virginia, Vermont and Kentucky.
In Philadelphia, an aide to a Republican city commissioner was bombarded with abuse shortly after the Nov. 3 vote after a Trump supporter, the former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, singled him out at a broadcast news conference.
In Vermont, a caller left threatening voice mail messages on election officials’ phones on Tuesday, including a call for them to face a firing squad. Although the calls were the first to be reported to law-enforcement authorities, the secretary of state, Jim Condos, said in a statement that “they are merely the extension of a pattern of vitriolic, often obscene, calls that our staff have had to endure during this election year.”
Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, said last month that she and her family received “utterly abhorrent” death threats after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the state’s electoral votes.
And in Phoenix, Adrian Fontes, who supervises elections across Maricopa County, said he and his staff had been threatened in “plenty of instances” in recent weeks. “It’s just not right,” said Mr. Fontes, a Democrat. “And frankly, it’s un-American.”
Not all the threats came from supporters of the president. In Michigan, The Detroit Free Press reported, the Republican chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers was pelted with emails containing photos of dead women and threats against her daughter after she initially refused to certify the results of the election last month.
