The election is over. A month later, the threats of violence against those who tallied the votes are still raging.

From Vermont to Arizona, election officials say they, their families, and even low-level election employees, are being harassed, as President Trump and his allies charge that the vote was rigged for Democrat Joe Biden.

“I think we should be very concerned,” said Rachel Kleinfeld,  a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Even though we are not seeing widespread physical violence in the public sphere, we are seeing the effects of violent intimidation.”

Here are a few of the best-known examples:

A noose with the name of a low-level election technician was found in Georgia, where multiple tallies found President Trump narrowly lost. That’s according to a top election official in the state, Gabriel Sterling.

In an emotional news conference earlier this week, Sterling detailed other threats against himself and the Georgia Secretary of State – and called on President Trump to “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.” 

“Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed. And it's not right.”

Last month, an attorney working on Trump’s bid to reverse the election results said a former top federal election security official “should be drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot." That official, Christopher Krebs, had said the 2020 election was not fraudulent, prompting Trump to fire him.

(The lawyer, Joe diGenova, later said the comments were made “in jest.”)

A key member of the Trump administration also says she has been harassed for her role in the election aftermath.  

Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, the federal agency charged with arranging transitions to new presidential administrations, said that she and her family were repeatedly threatened amid criticism she was taking too long to affirm that Joe Biden won the election and merited post-election resources.

The threats, Murphy wrote in a Nov. 23 letter to Biden, were “online, by phone, and by mail directed at my safety, my family, my staff, and even my pets in an effort to coerce me into making this determination prematurely. Even in the face of thousands of threats, I always remained committed to upholding the law.”

Figures typically out of the public eye are also threatened, like the security director for Dominion Voting Systems, which implemented Georgia’s paper ballot system and is the target of baseless conspiracy theories from Trump’s legal team, led by former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. 

“I do not think this goes away on January 20,” Eric Coomer, security director for Dominion Voting Systems, told the Associated Press from the secret location where he is hiding out from death threats. “I think it will continue for a long time.”

Asked for comment, Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the Trump campaign, said in a statement: “The campaign’s legal team is focused on ensuring that all legal votes are counted and all illegal votes are not. No one should engage in threats or violence, and if that has happened, we condemn that fully. It’s important to note that buildings in cities across America were not boarded up on Election Day to protect them from Trump supporters. It is the radical left which has been responsible for actual violence, arson, and looting nationwide.” 

While impossible to quantify, the examples of post-election harassment are but a fraction of those recently surfacing in news reports about the election; public health officials have also been repeatedly threatened amid measures to save lives amid the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The pandemic complicated voting, endangering poll workers.

“These civil servants have, in many cases, gone above and beyond to ensure a fair and accessible election, sometimes putting themselves at a high risk of exposure,” the Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, said in a statement.

“They deserve our thanks, not to be accused of cheating and to have their integrity questioned publicly every single day, especially by the President and our elected leaders, despite any actual evidence of wrongdoing.”

Condos’ office said it alerted law enforcement after receiving multiple voicemails earlier this week “calling for specific acts of violence to occur to our staff.” It said the investigation is ongoing.

“They are merely the extension of a pattern of vitriolic, often obscene, calls that our staff have had to endure during this election year,” the statement said.

So far, around the country, contested results have not led apparently to physical violence -- and one former top federal election security official cautioned against giving the threats too much attention.  

“We have been concerned about the prospect of violence, political violence, for quite some time now, certainly in the run up to the election,” said Suzanne Spaulding, Senior Adviser for Homeland Security in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  

“We worried about it on Election Day and since. But I think we have to be careful also not to overstate it and certainly not to give oxygen to those, particularly on social media, bad actors who would like to try to promote and stir up this kind of unrest and violence.”

In the Obama administration, Spaulding led the National Protection and Programs Directorate – now called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which Krebs led until his firing.

There were 61 terrorist attacks and plots that occurred domestically between January 1 and August 31 of this year, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

It finds far-right extremists, like white supremacists, account for 67 percent of the cases. The findings echo congressional testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said racially-motivated extremism – especially white supremacist – make up the bulk of domestic terrorism cases.

The threats gaining the most attention appear motivated by a belief that Trump is right to assert fraud is behind vote tallies that show Biden won the election. It’s a position the President is refusing to cede – posting a 46-minute speech Wednesday widely seen as factually inaccurate. He has repeatedly lost in court, and this week his own attorney general, William Barr, said the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud that would change the results. 

Threatening language in American politics is not a new phenomenon, whether in previous centuries or this one – even on the floor of the U.S. Capitol. It has often spilled over into violence, including the Civil War. 

An ominous hum of rage coursed through this 2016 campaign season and continued this cycle, and after, with Georgia a particularly fraught place – with implications for a pair of special elections Jan. 5 for both U.S. Senate seats.

The president and his supporters are criticizing Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and other officials for certifying results that show Trump coming up short. (At a pro-Trump rally earlier this week, protesters even called for Kemp to be imprisoned.)

Lack of faith in the January election could suppress GOP turnout, giving Democrats the advantage, which would lead to a 50-50 split in the Senate broken by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

But this week, life and death – not politics – seemed to stir Sterling, the election official, a self-described conservative, who was previously known only among Georgians – or those closely following the county-by-county minutiae that he calmly delivered.

Tuesday in Atlanta, he appeared enraged as he threw off his face mask and addressed the press with details of the harassment.

“It has all gone too far. All of it,” he said. “It has to stop.” 

“Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some.”

By the next day, his remarks had been seen millions of times. 

Kleinfeld, of the Carnegie Endowment, suggested several measures Americans practice to lower the temperature:

  • Call out violence, particularly among your social groups
  • Use humor or friendliness in interactions on social media
  • Humanize the other side
  • Recognize that the pandemic is making life more difficult

“All the normal ways we let off steam are being closed to people,” Kleinfeld said. “And that's dangerous. And it's also very human and understandable.”