Editor’s note: This story contains profanity and racist slurs.
When Milton Kidd leaves work at the end of the day, he walks out the back door of the Douglas County Courthouse, avoiding the public entrance where people might berate him or demand 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 director of elections and voter registration for Douglas County.
“Milton Kidd is a nasty black who lives off tax money like the scum he is,” one voter wrote in an email Kidd shared with Stateline. “Living off tax money, like a low IQ piece of black shit.”
Another resident of Kidd County, a population of 149,000 west of Atlanta, left him a voicemail.
“I don’t know if you know this, Milton, but the American people have set a precedent for what they do with the damn tyrants and oppressors who hold government positions,” the caller said. “Yeah, back in the 18th century, they called them British and the damn Americans got tired of the damn British being idiots, kind of like you, and then they just got screwed. He killed all the damn British.”
Kidd smiled in disbelief as she shared her safety routine and the hateful messages that inspired it. He is stunned to be the target of such vitriol for administering the 2024 election, but he knows where it originated.
The lies told by former President Donald Trump, who faces state felony charges for trying to pressure Georgia officials to change the 2020 results, have resonated with many Douglas County voters, Kidd said. Now this nonpartisan official, like many others across the country, is forced to face his wrath.
“It’s an idea that has become insidious in the American mindset, that because a single individual didn’t win an election, I can now behave like this,” said Kidd, who has a thick beard and carries a crystal the size of a thumb on a black thread around his neck.
As he prepares for the upcoming presidential election, Kidd said he will continue to push his state’s elected officials for more leadership and money to protect him, his staff and the democratic process.
“If this office fails, then our democracy has failed,” he said. “I will never allow a naysayer who calls with vile language to deter me from the work I do.”
Like standing in a puddle of gasoline
Kidd is far from the only election official who has faced threats inspired by the lies of Trump and his allies, who continue to claim without evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Nationally, 38% of local election officials have experienced threats, harassment or abuse since 2020 just for doing their jobs, according to a poll published in May by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit voting rights organization located at New York University School of Law. 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, Supervisor of Elections Joseph Kirk has taken steps to protect himself, although he will not reveal specific details. While harassment has not reached the level he has in other counties, he said he has lost staff members who have left their positions due to the change in atmosphere.
“There’s a lot more animosity now,” he said in his Cartersville office, a red brick building 4 miles from Main Street.
Cobb County Elections Director Tate Fall is also strengthening her elections office in the Atlanta suburbs. In the coming weeks, her office will install shatterproof security film on the glass that protects the front desk. More access points will require key cards to enter and there will be additional panic buttons.
“It’s very surreal,” he said. “In the office, people have become so desensitized to yelling that they no longer consider it a threat.”
At least a dozen states have enacted new protections for local election officials in recent years, including increased criminal penalties for those who threaten or harass them.
This month, Georgia officials announced a requirement, for the first time in the country, that all new police officers take a course on election security, focusing in part on protecting election officials from threats.
This is part of a broader mission to develop greater coordination between sheriff’s offices and election offices, said Chris Harvey, deputy executive director of the Georgia Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training Council, which will lead the effort.
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 in January 2021, he was duped: his home address and a photograph of his house were posted online. He also received a death threat via email that included a photo of himself with a crosshairs on his face.
Although he says he was not worried about his safety, he was worried about his wife and four children who were at home. He called the local police, who parked a car in front of his house for two weeks.
“In this supercharged environment, it’s like standing in a puddle of gasoline,” he told Stateline. “Anything can trigger it. It was not like this in the past”.
The democratic path
The fragile promise of democracy has always been a part of Kidd’s life.
Kidd, 39, grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois, a former manufacturing center of 18,000 people along 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 security. But soon after his ancestors arrived, white mobs killed hundreds of newly arrived blacks over several months in 1917, displacing 6,000 blacks in the southern Illinois city.
Her grandmother was a sharecropper in Luxor, Arkansas, and she instilled in her mother the importance of voting. Growing up, she heard stories about civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten for registering voters, and Medgar Evers, who was murdered. She turned Kidd into a student of history, capable of reciting the Declaration of Independence and parts of the Constitution.
“The importance of the ballot box has always been stressed to me,” he said. “I know that in my own family some people have tried to register to vote and have been attacked with dogs. These are not words from a book. “It’s not that far.”
Inspired by his father, who left school in ninth grade to work, and his mother, who received 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 what he called a “reverse migration” back to the South to begin working elections in several Atlanta-area counties, including Douglas County. He started there in 2015 and was promoted to run the office three years later.
During that time, Kidd saw the electoral environment turn unpleasant.
“We have reshaped this nation into an uglier, vile, more vitriolic spirit that we simply allow to continue to manifest,” he said last month.
He and his eight full-time staff members have attempted to bolster their public reputation by attending local churches, fairs and political party meetings of both parties to share details about how elections are carried out and tabulate the vote securely.
But it needs more resources from the State. The same lawmakers who wink and nod at the lie that massive fraud is stealing elections do not support additional funding for local election administration, he said, especially for the security of election administrators.
Every security improvement he made to his office, including a series of magnetic locks on the doors, was obtained through outside grants, a practice the state later outlaw in 2021.
Some of Kidd’s staff have resigned and he is finding it difficult to fill the temporary positions that allow the election to run smoothly. Constant rotation can lead to errors, which creates more mistrust. The workers who have stayed are still afraid.
“On election night, my husband definitely waits for me to get home,” said Tesha Green, the county’s deputy elections director. “You always have to make sure no one is there when you walk out the door.”
Kidd was encouraged by Georgia’s announcement that it would require all new police officers to take a course on election security. Does Kidd feel supported by his local sheriff’s office? He chuckled and said much more could be done.
Chap. Trent Wilson of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said the office took Kidd’s complaints seriously. Although they were troubling, he said, there was nothing criminal about the voicemails and emails Kidd received.
“It was very unpleasant,” Wilson said. “But just because they’re nasty doesn’t mean they’re criminals.”
When asked what constitutes a threat, he added: “Look, I’m a black man. That’s why we don’t like being called *****. But calling someone ***** is not a crime.”
Come election season, he said, the sheriff’s office increases security and adds more deputies to the courthouse. Visitors already must pass through metal detectors, she noted.
As head of the elections office, Kidd knows he is a target and has accepted it. But he worries about his staff, many of whom are older women who don’t feel safe walking to their cars at night. And, closer to home, he worries that if something happens to him, no one will be able to take care of his beloved dogs, Kleo and Knight.
“In 2024, I will have a job where I have to allow people to call me *****,” he said. “But I do it because I want to make sure people have access to the ballot box.”
Stateline is a sister news outlet to Georgia Recorder and part of the States Newsroom network.
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