Officials in a key county in battleground Georgia are taking a new step to ensure the safety of poll workers amid rising threats by 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 suburb northwest of Atlanta, this week approved $47,250 in funding to purchase about 200 machines for poll workers ahead of another heated presidential election this fall.
The panic buttons are sold by Runbeck Election Services, an Arizona-based company that prints ballots and sells voting equipment, including printers, to counties across the country through a partnership with Ohio-based security company Response Technologies. The devices are about the size of a credit card and can be worn on lanyards or slipped into pockets. They pair with users' cell phones to provide GPS locations to authorities when activated.
The badges, which cost $150 to $250 a year, can be programmed to send notifications to election officials, law enforcement or both, said Matt Volkerding, vice president of sales at Response Technologies.
The two companies teamed up nearly a month ago to sell the panic buttons to poll workers this year and are already in talks to sell 1,500 badges in at least five states. Runbeck reached out to its existing customers and presented the product at national election conferences.
“We assumed maybe 10 or 20 counties would be interested, and we talked to every county or state has shown interest in it,” Runbeck CEO Jeff Ellington said in an interview.
The devices are the latest way state and local officials are trying to combat increasingly hostile working conditions among some poll workers, nearly 40% of whom said they have experienced threats, harassment or mistreatment this year.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, since 2020, 17 states and Washington, D.C. have increased protections for poll workers and election officials, and some counties are also implementing de-escalation training for workers.
Former President Donald Trump, who has long spread false claims about the 2020 election results, has now begun suggesting that the 2024 election could be stolen from him, raising renewed concerns about threats and harassment disrupting the vote could.
States and localities across the country have spent much of the last year conducting safety assessments and conducting interagency exercises to plan for potential problems. Some officials have called for an additional police presence at polling places, while others are seeking to give poll workers the ability to quickly contact law enforcement in the event of conflicts.
Ellington said Colorado officials, in addition to Cobb County, 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 discuss his plans.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson recently told reporters that officials are rolling out a cellphone-based program inspired by one in Georgia in 2022 that will allow counties that opt in to send information directly to law enforcement via text message .
Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State, said 24 of the state's 159 counties use it. He said texting allows officers to provide details and more context about potential threats or emergencies and is a more cost-effective option than physical panic buttons.
Zachary Manifold, the elections director in Gwinnett County, also in the Atlanta area, said county officials are considering using panic buttons as part of their security planning but have heard that it has led to false alarms elsewhere.
“I think my biggest concern is probably what we've heard from the schools that were introduced here maybe a few years ago – they said there was a huge learning curve,” he said. “The one thing we heard from the police chief of our schools was that implementation is not as easy as you think. We’re trying to see if there might be something else, so we’re playing with the idea.”
That was the experience of Kim Wyman, a former Washington secretary of state and senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., when she first tried to use a panic button decades ago as an election official in Thurston County. Washington.
When her team tried to hit a panic button, police never came, she said, and a staff member ended up calling 911 instead. Wyman said she later learned that they weren't using the panic button properly — users have to hold it down for three seconds rather than just touching it once — and that police weren't monitoring it on their end either.
“It’s a good tool for employees to help them feel more comfortable,” Wyman said in an interview, emphasizing, “You definitely have to practice with it.”
CORRECTION (August 16, 2024, 3:32 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated the number of counties in Georgia that use a cellular-based program for poll workers to contact authorities in 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 originally provided.)
