How election officials in the South have cheered on political violence

Election officials in the South have intimated their support for political violence, part of a broader pattern of threats from the American right.

I called a number in Mississippi a few weeks back and a woman answered. She said she was the county clerk. I asked her how I could reach the county election commission and she said they don’t keep regular office hours, which I figured. I told her I needed to leave a message for one of the commissioners — which in Mississippi are actually elected to carry out their duties of local election administration, instead of being appointed like they are in most other places — and she asked which one. I told her I was looking for Jim Jackson, a Lee County election commissioner. When she asked why, I told her the things he had said online about elections and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and she said she was surprised, said something about him being such a nice, soft-spoken man. 

Maybe he is in person but on his Facebook page he is just like all the other election denial officials I’ve written about here because he lives in a different world than the woman who answered the phone — a world of his online making. 

“Judgment day won’t be rigged,” Jackson posted after Trump lost in 2020, combining two primary themes of modern Republicanism: fundamentalist Christianity and election denialism.

Jackson and other election officials I’ve researched have alluded to their acceptance of political violence in American Doom’s examination of hundreds — hell, maybe a thousand — of their Facebook posts from the last four years. The posts about political violence haven’t been as explicit as, say, those made by Dalton Mattus, who was definitely planning something when he started working on the 13 bombs that police found either completed or were still under construction. But the mention of political violence by the election officials I’ve come across is reflective of a much more widespread and troubling acceptance of violence as a political tactic among everyday Americans. 

Below are some of those statements from local election officials throughout the South who have intimated their support for political violence. Many editions of this newsletter are free but this one is behind a paywall because this story is the result of many months of investigation into hundreds of local election officials. To support American Doom’s work exposing election denial officials, right-wing extremists and other threats to democracy, subscribe here.

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