Vice News spoke with over a dozen election officials who had experienced death threats and felt endangered during the 2020 election period.

“Officials across the United States experienced physical stalking, explicitly violent phone calls, racial slurs, home surveillance, bomb scares, and threats of mass shootings. For some officials in Georgia and Pennsylvania, the threats have continued for nearly a year. And now, many of these officials want to quit.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) appointed John Scott — an attorney who represented former President Donald Trump in a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania — as Texas’ new secretary of state, the Texas Tribune reports.

Scott will now oversee election administration in Texas.

“Despite unusually heavy lobbying from former President Donald Trump, two elections bills that he pushed Gov. Greg Abbott to enact this fall are all but dead,” the Houston Chronicle reports.

Washington Post: “Voting rights advocates meet once every week or two with White House officials via video conference, and in almost every session, an advocate speaks up to say that President Biden must do more, that American democracy is under threat and the president is not meeting the challenge.”

“At one such meeting earlier this year, a Biden aide responded that Democrats would simply have to ‘out-organize’ the other side, according to multiple advocates familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting. The comment infuriated advocates, who believe they are watching former president Donald Trump actively and perhaps permanently undermine faith in U.S. elections.”

Peter Nicholas: Is Biden doing enough to protect democracy?

“Even before he lost his reelection bid, former President Donald Trump has been obsessed with challenging and changing election laws. Should he find himself back in the White House, his allies are hoping to turn that obsession into legislative action,” Politico reports.

“Trump is expected to mount another bid for president in 2024. And as talk of such a campaign has grown more concrete, so too has speculation over what type of agenda he’d actually pursue.”

“An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office,” the Texas Tribune reports.

“Hood County would seem an unlikely place for disputes over the last presidential election given that Trump won 81% of the vote there, one of his largest margins of victory in the state.”

“The elections office in Georgia’s heavily Democratic Fulton County said on Monday that two workers had been fired for shredding voter registration forms, most likely adding fuel to a Republican-led investigation of the office that critics call politically motivated,” the New York Times reports.

“The workers, at the Fulton County Board of Elections, were dismissed on Friday after other employees saw them destroying registration forms awaiting processing before local elections in November.”

“The Democratic National Committee is seeking to intervene in a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Republicans aimed at curbing the use of mail voting,” NBC News reports.

“Fourteen Pennsylvania Republican legislators filed a lawsuit against the commonwealth on Aug. 31, arguing that a 2019 law that expanded access to mail voting to all eligible voters was unconstitutional.”

“The attorney leading a partisan review of Wisconsin’s 2020 election acknowledged this week that he doesn’t understand how elections are supposed to be run,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Said former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman: “Most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work.”

Nineteen states have passed 33 news laws this year that make it harder to vote, according to an updated analysis released Monday, CNN reports.

“California’s pandemic-inspired move toward mailing a ballot to every registered, active voter will become a permanent part of the state’s political landscape, an embrace of an extended and flexible voting process instead of the traditional focus on a single day of voting in person,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature Monday on Assembly Bill 37 makes California the eighth state in the nation with a law on the books requiring every voter to be mailed a ballot. The new law is part of an evolution of voting in the state over the last two decades, an effort to provide voters more options for when and where to cast their ballots.”

“The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

— Election law expert Rick Hasen, in an interview with Politico.

On the Media: “The story of Arizona’s almost year-long quest to undermine its own election results is less like a coda, and more an overture of what’s coming for America’s election system.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “As with most things Trump, it’s hard to tell whether there’s method to any of this. Perhaps Trump really believes the conspiracy theories he spouts and thinks this is the way to prove them. Perhaps he, or other anti-democracy Republicans, are deliberately attempting to undermine trust in election results by encouraging the belief that all election administration is as partisan as these efforts are. Perhaps it’s a function of private companies seeking to cash in. Perhaps it’s what plays well, for whatever reason, in Republican-aligned media — a fad they’ll ride until they find something else.”

“Perhaps it’s some combination of all of this.”