Some states are also moving to pass new laws or strengthen existing laws.
“Many of these incidents have one thing in common: election deniers have announced their intent to violently punish those they believe have wronged them,” Arizona 's U.S. attorney, Gary M. Restaino, told reporters last month when he announced that the judge had acted unfairly. Joshua Russell, a 46-year-old Ohio man, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for sending death threats to then-Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs between August and November 2022.
Russell, a native of Bucyrus, Ohio, said in a letter of apology to Hobbs, now Arizona's governor, that he was acting on false information he consumed without vetting its accuracy.
“I started calling public officials I didn't like,” he wrote in a letter to Hobbs. After the FBI searched his home and charged him, he said he had “never felt so stupid and embarrassed.”
Perhaps the most well-known example of misinformation leading to intimidation is what happened to two election workers in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shay Moss, after Election Day 2020. Mr. Trump's personal lawyer at the time, Rudolph W. Giuliani, made the accusation publicly. Massive threats were made against women for their participation in electoral fraud. (The women won a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Giuliani last year, with a jury ruling that he should pay $148 million in damages and sending Mr. Giuliani directly to bankruptcy court.) )
Of the more than 400 threats Freeman received, only one resulted in an indictment, according to people familiar with the case. Chad Christopher Stark, 55, of Leander, Texas, was also charged with threatening another Georgia state employee and was sentenced to two years in prison.