Officials in a key county in battleground Georgia are taking a new step to ensure election workers’ safety amid rising threats, equipping them with so-called panic buttons that would allow them to quickly contact authorities in emergencies.
The Board of Commissioners in Cobb County, a suburban area northwest of Atlanta, this week approved $47,250 in funding to purchase around 200 devices for election workers ahead of another heated presidential election this fall.
The panic buttons are being sold by Runbeck Election Services, an Arizona-based company that prints ballots and sells election equipment, including printers, to counties across the country, through a partnership with the Ohio-based security company Response Technologies. The devices are roughly the size of a credit card and can be worn on lanyards or tucked in pockets. They pair with users’ cellphones to dispatch GPS locations to the authorities when activated.
The badges, which cost $150 to $250 per year, can be programmed to send alerts to election authorities, law enforcement or both, said Matt Volkerding, vice president of sales at Response Technologies.
The two companies partnered nearly a month ago to sell the panic buttons to election workers this year and are already in talks to sell 1,500 badges in at least five states. Runbeck approached its existing clients and has been presenting the product at statewide election conferences.
“We thought maybe 10 or 20 counties would show interest, and it’s been every county or state that we’ve talked to has shown interest in this,” Runbeck CEO Jeff Ellington said in an interview.
The devices are the latest way state and local officials are seeking to combat the increasingly hostile working conditions facing some election workers, nearly 40% of whom reported this year having experienced threats, harassment or abuse.
Since 2020, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have increased protections for poll workers and election officials, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and some counties are incorporating de-escalation training for workers, too.
Former President Donald Trump, who has long spread false claims about the 2020 election results, has now begun to suggest the 2024 election could be stolen from him, leading to renewed concerns about threats and harassment that could disturb voting.
States and municipalities around the country have spent much of the last year conducting security assessments and running multiagency exercises to plan for potential problems. Some officials have requested additional police presence at the polls, while others try to give election workers the ability to contact law enforcement quickly in the event of conflicts.
Ellington said that in addition to Cobb County, Colorado officials also have several panic buttons on hand. A spokesman for the Colorado State Department, Kailee Stiles, said the office would not comment on security measures. A Cobb County official declined to speak about its plans.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told reporters recently that officials are rolling out a cellphone-based program, inspired by one in Georgia in 2022, that allows counties that opt in to directly text information to law enforcement agencies.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said 24 of the state’s 159 counties use it. He said texting allows officials to offer specifics and give more context about potential threats or emergencies and is a cheaper option than the physical panic buttons.
Zachary Manifold, the elections supervisor in Gwinnett County, also in the Atlanta area, said county officials were considering using panic buttons as part of their security planning but heard it had caused false alarms elsewhere.
“I think probably my biggest concern about it is from what we’ve heard from, the schools implemented here maybe a couple years ago — they said there’s a huge learning curve,” he said. “The one thing we heard back from our schools’ police chief was that it’s not quite as easy to implement as you think. We’re trying to figure out if maybe there’s something else, so we’re kicking around the idea of it.”
That was the experience of Kim Wyman, a former Washington secretary of state and senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, when she first tried to use a panic button decades ago as the elections director in Thurston County, Washington.
When her team tried to activate a panic button, police never came, she said, and a staffer eventually called 911, instead. Wyman said she later learned that they were not using the panic button properly — users must hold it down for three seconds, not just touch it once — and the police were not monitoring it on their end, either.
“It’s a good tool for staff to have to make them feel more comfortable,” Wyman said in an interview, stressing, “You absolutely have to drill and practice with it.”
CORRECTION (Aug. 16, 2024, 3:32 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the number of Georgia counties that use a cellphone-based program for election workers to contact authorities in case of emergencies. Twenty-four counties use it, not nearly half of the state’s 159 counties. (The Georgia secretary of state’s office contacted NBC News after publication to correct the number they’d initially given.)
