One enormously moving moment in the House Select Committee hearings in 2021 was the testimony by Shaye Moss (Andrea ArShaye Moss) about the abuse she and her mother (Ruby Freeman) endured after they were unjustly accused of election fraud by Rudy Giuliani and others.
For example, “In her Facebook Messenger app, she found dozens of threats and death threats, many of them racist in nature.” (See article on pbs.org Politics, 21 June 2022.) Both she and her mother were targeted after right-wing organizations posted video that Giuliani claimed showed them tampering with votes during their regular work on elections. They were both later cleared of any wrongdoing.
A few days ago, public officials were targeted with letters containing fentanyl. (See article on The Guardian website by Sam Levine, 10 November 2023.)
Law enforcement officials in the US are searching for the people responsible for sending letters with suspicious substances sent to election offices in at least five states, acts some election officials described as “terrorism”. Election offices in Georgia, Nevada, California, Oregon and Washington state all were sent the letters, four of which contained the deadly drug fentanyl, the Associated Press reported.
Other threats come by phone or e-mail messages. This is not new. In response to “a torrent of threats and abuse after Democratic electoral victories” in 2020, the FBI stepped up investigations. Election administrators hoped that "individuals might finally be held to account for the barrage of threats spurred by falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.” (See article on CNN Politics by Fredreka Schouten, 20 September 2021.)
Richard Barron, who oversaw elections in Fulton County, Georgia, said:
[H]e and his staff faced a torrent of threats and abuse after Democratic electoral victories last year [2020] in the traditionally red state. He said he recently shared two death threats with local FBI officials, including one made earlier this summer that warned he “would be served lead.”
While many of these threats are triggered by politicians and others with large followings, like Donald Trump, it is difficult to rein in those people because it is difficult to reliably connect them with the crimes others commit at their behest.
But we don’t need to do that to end much of this behavior. What we need is positive identification of senders.
We could have a technology and process solution. The technology component is linking messages back to the specific individual sending that message, so that law enforcement could arrest them and courts could convict them. It is already illegal to threaten or harass others. The difficulty is identifying them and proving in court that they made the threats or harassed the target.
The process part of this is for organizations and individuals to set and enforce a policy of only accepting messages where the origin is positively identified.
For example, mail delivered would only be opened if it was sent in a way that positively identified the sender. To send the envelope or package, a person would have to show identification and sign that they are responsible for the contents. It would help if there was video evidence of them doing so.
Any envelopes or packages delivered that were not sent with positive sender ID would simply be destroyed.
The same could be done with e-mail messages and phone calls. Even social media could be engineered to show definitively who sent a message. The sender would, for example, receive a phone call or text message with an ID to put in, to show that they were the person who actually sent the message. For those sufficiently paranoid, that code might have to be embedded in a photo of the sender taken at the time of transmission and sent along with it.
All social media that transmits messages to a specific person should have this capability. That includes Facebook Messenger. And it should be possible to sign up for an account where only such messages would be delivered.
Phone calls could equally have positive caller ID, where an individual would get a code to use upon making the call. This would act as proof that the person getting the call was actually being called by a specific person.
This would allow election offices, for example, to require positive sender ID for everything: phone, e-mail, fax, postal mail, package delivery, social media transmissions—everything. Election offices could then require it for every connection, thus protecting their officers and staff.
This would not eliminate all threats. Some people, obviously, arrive in person to intimidate others. But in those cases, a good security detail or police presence could provide the needed deterrent. But for those who think they can just casually harass public officials, it would be vastly harder.
This would make normal business somewhat harder, but not prohibitively so. If you had legitimate business with the elections officials, you could still call them. You’d just have to provide a security code that showed who you were. You could still mail them. You’d just have to go to a post office, show ID, and sign for what you are sending.
Long ago, I lived in an open society. I could post a letter to anyone (with about a three-cent stamp), and they didn’t have to worry I had dipped it in anthrax before putting it in the envelope. I could get a bottle of aspirin at the store, unscrew the top, and take one without having to unseal it. I could board a plane without anyone so much as looking at me between the counter where I got the ticket and the ramp to the plane.
We didn’t have e-mail.
We did have phones, but I didn’t worry about the government listening in. (The neighbors, if it was a party line, but not the government.)
I don’t want to live in a society where everyone fears picking up the phone. Or opening the mail. Or anything else, for that matter.
So, I’d like this problem fixed. And after working for decades in technology, I sincerely believe there is a technological+process solution to this problem.
Don’t you?