Powder-Laced Letters Sent to Election Officials in Multiple States

Photo: Karen Ducey/AP

As voters headed to the polls this week, several election offices across the country received suspicious, powder-laced letters, prompting investigations in five different states.

Offices in Georgia, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington State all reported receiving letters addressed to local election officials. Some of the letters contained traces of fentanyl, including those sent to King County and Spokane County in Washington, as well as to Fulton County in Georgia, per the New York Times. The Justice Department said that both the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating the incidents.

The discovery of the envelopes prompted evacuations of elections offices in Washington State on Wednesday as county workers were processing ballots from the previous night’s election. In a statement, Washington secretary of State Steve Hobbs condemned the action.

“These incidents are acts of terrorism to threaten our elections,” he said.

One of the letters included messages like “END ELECTIONS NOW,” “STOP GIVING POWER TO THE RIGHT THAT THEY DON’T HAVE,” and “WE ARE IN CHARGE NOW AND THERE IS NO MORE NEED FOR THEM,” according to the Washington Post. The note also reportedly featured several symbols, including a Pride flag and a pentagram, but authorities are still uncertain as to the political leanings or particular motives of the sender.

During a press availability Thursday, Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the U.S. Postal Service had flagged a letter en route to Fulton County that they suspect contains traces of fentanyl, a substance that had a tragic impact on Raffensperger’s family.

“Some people like to call fentanyl a drug, but it’s actually poison. It’ll kill you. It’ll kill you very quickly and very easily. It’s very dangerous,” he said. “We lost our son five and half years ago due to fentanyl overdose. We know how deadly this stuff is.”

Threats against election officials have only increased in number since Donald Trump tried to undermine the 2020 presidential election. In 2022, the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force reviewed more than 1,000 instances of potentially threatening contacts, with 11 percent of them reaching the threshold for a federal investigation.

Raffensperger, whose family was subject to threats after he resisted pressure to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results in favor of Trump, called upon political candidates to denounce the attacks on election workers.

“If they don’t condemn this, they’re not worthy of the office they’re running for,”he said. “This is domestic terrorism and it needs to be condemned by anyone who holds elected office and anyone that wants to hold elected office anywhere in America.”