Election security in Georgia includes panic buttons and Narcan

Nancy Boren has been overseeing elections in Muscogee County, Georgia, for nearly thirty years, but her work has changed dramatically in recent years.

Just a few weeks before her interview with Scripps News, Boren received an alarming text message. The message read in part: “Those people who oppose hand counting should imagine this happening in their homes on January 6. As soon as gangs and riots break out, they take on a life of their own.”

“It concerned me, but I probably didn’t take it as seriously as I should have,” Boren said of the message. “And I think that’s a quality that a lot of us have as election officials. We receive these, but we don’t take them seriously because we can’t believe this would ever happen to us.”

In 2020, Georgia became a hotbed of conspiracy theories and disinformation about the electoral process and results. Election officials and poll workers across the state were targets of intimidation and even death threats. Now the security procedures have been updated.

Boren gave Scripps News a tour of its facility, which has a panic button in the front office. A second button is located further down the facility, behind a locked door.

“We don’t want them to stay at the front,” Boren explained. “If they have to press the panic button, we want them to get to safety.”

Law enforcement is also an important part of the equation.

“The Georgia Sheriff’s Office is responsible for all government offices and elections,” said Muscogee County Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas Medlin. “So our patrol units are constantly moving from district to district throughout the day, every 30 to 45 minutes.”

Asked if he ever thought securing elections would be part of his job, Medlin said, “No.”

“I took it for granted,” he said. “This is an institution, always has been and always will be.”

One of the more extreme emergency measures Boren’s office has taken involves the case of fentanyl exposure through the mail.

“Every province has the Narcan. I never thought an election official would need Narcan,” Boren said as he unzipped a small blue bag containing the adverse drug that was being distributed to election officials in every Georgia county. “We’re not particularly concerned about it, but we’re prepared if we do get it.”

She also invested several thousand dollars in GPS trackers for the ballots and showed a live update on her computer of where each of the trackers were on a map of Muscogee County.

“We felt it was important to be able to track the ballots as that is the official record of the vote from the polling place to the central table,” Boren said. “And we bought the tracker so we could do that.”

To learn more about these drastic changes and how Georgia is working to keep election workers and voters safe, Scripps News traveled to Atlanta to talk with Gabe Sterling, the Chief Operating Officer for Georgia’s Secretary of State.

“Fulton County received a fentanyl-laden letter early this year,” Sterling said, referring to the November 2023 incident when election offices in multiple states received suspicious letters, some containing the deadly drug. “So we distributed Narcan to all 159 counties and then trained for that.”

“We worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency to inspect every location where our election equipment is located,” Sterling said. “There was one office, Homeland came and they had a bunch of windows in the front and they were told, you have to park your cars along the front here. Why? It’s actually the front of the windows, to stop any bombs. And that is the level we are dealing with in this area. “

When asked how concerned he was about misinformation and disinformation about the election leading to physical threats, Sterling said, “My biggest concern, I’ve been saying this for two years, is not some militia coming together to go somewhere.” march. trying to overturn an election. My biggest concern is the radicalization of people who are mentally unstable to begin with, who believe they want to save America from the right or from the left.”

Sterling also spoke to the broader commentary on increased security measures over the past four years — and what that means for democracy in the United States.

“You understand, we’ve been through this before. It’s not the end of the world. Is it terrible? Yes. The things we don’t have, that we never had to think about for a while. Yes, we will get through it. Georgia is resilient. The voters are resilient. The United States is resilient. And I have confidence and optimism that we will get through this.”

With early voting underway, Muscogee County voters who spoke with Scripps News said they feel safe casting their ballots.

“We have very courageous, very dedicated poll workers,” Boren said. “We have a great group of people, and they’re not really worried right now.”