In Politico

“I’m scared to death” about the level of voter distrust heading into 2024, said Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, which includes the capital of Tallahassee.

Earley’s comments were echoed by dozens of others among a crowd of nearly 100 local election workers who gathered in Crystal City, Virginia, last week for an annual confab hosted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

[…]

The two-day event was supposed to be a forum for local officials to review and rehearse often mundane election administration practices, like handling mail safely or responding to severe weather events.

But concerns about voter distrust and conspiracies cropped up repeatedly even though they claimed no formal place on the agenda. During group breakout sessions, hallway conversations and coffee breaks, attendees expressed both alarm and exasperation about how difficult it was to convince some Americans that the vote could be trusted.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, what we say or how much we educate the skeptics,” Kellie Harris Hopkins, the director of elections in Beaufort County, North Carolina, said during a roundtable. Roughly a dozen other officials nodded their heads, snapped their fingers or murmured in agreement.

While federal officials and state leaders often act as the face of election integrity at the national level, it is local election workers who actually run U.S. elections, doing everything from processing ballots to checking in voters.

That also means they’re the ones who most directly confront election conspiracy theories — and the violence and intimidation they increasingly fuel.

One in six election workers have experienced threats because of their job, and 77 percent said those threats had increased in recent years, according to a March 2022 study from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, capturing the impact of false election fraud claims by Donald Trump and his allies since 2020.

On its surface, Khan’s clean air zone is hardly the stuff of revolution. Called the London Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), it imposed a daily charge of £12.50 (about $15) on highly polluting vehicles traversing the central parts of the capital and enforced the sanctions with roadside cameras. Yet its expansion in late August has distorted U.K. national politics and Khan’s political prospects, and would even come to pose a threat to his personal safety.

The new pollution charge has been met with a seething public backlash — one I would later encounter firsthand in a village on London’s furthest reaches.

According to a person close to the mayor — who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters — anti-ULEZ protesters have regularly turned up at Khan’s South London home, including when his two daughters were there alone. For several days, a caravan was chained outside his house bearing slogans and artwork that included swastikas. Protesters targeted his family for abuse at public events.

A town hall meeting in early November had to be moved to City Hall for security reasons. During the meeting, a man yelled that, centuries ago, Khan would have been hung from the “gallows.” Police have regularly searched the mayor’s house and car in response to written notes claiming explosive devices had been planted. In October, a letter came in the mail, addressed to him, with a bullet inside.

I'm inclined to wonder whether this may be an official leak; inoculation, aimed at the feeble consciences of Dem centrists. i.e. "Oh, so what we say is monstrous, what we do is worse, but at least what we think is okay."

The memo has two key requests: that the U.S. support a ceasefire, and that it balance its private and public messaging toward Israel, including airing criticisms of Israeli military tactics and treatment of Palestinians that the U.S. generally prefers to keep private.

The gap between America’s private and public messaging “contributes to regional public perceptions that the United States is a biased and dishonest actor, which at best does not advance, and at worst harms, U.S. interests worldwide,” the document states.

“We must publicly criticize Israel’s violations of international norms such as failure to limit offensive operations to legitimate military targets,” the message also states. “When Israel supports settler violence and illegal land seizures or employs excessive use of force against Palestinians, we must communicate publicly that this goes against our American values so that Israel does not act with impunity.”

 Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room last week, the CEOs of the most powerful financial institutions in the world offered several explanations for paying high salaries to their employees — and, by extension, to themselves.

“These are complicated companies,” one CEO said. Offered another: “We’re competing for talent on an international market.”

But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”