Online Hostility Towards Local Election Officials Surged in 2020

Abstract

One of the biggest success stories of the 2020 presidential election was the ability of election officials to conduct a smooth and safe election despite the many challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This success story, however, brought a barrage of harsh rhetoric against election officials in online spaces, driven by false information about the legitimacy of elections. More election officials are now using social media to communicate with voters, but recent trends show that voters also use these channels to disrupt the provision of information by posting threats and negative rhetoric. Evidence from the 2020 election shows state election officials were subject to this behavior on Twitter. In this chapter, we investigate whether these trends exist at the local level by analyzing the content and sentiment of responses to local election official's tweets between 2012 and 2022. We collect and analyze tweets from all 258 Twitter accounts run by local election officials, analyzing their 264,905 tweets and the 133,199 replies to those tweets over the last decade. Considering the surges in resignations of local election officials since 2020, it is important to investigate how harsh language directed at them on social media adds to a hostile environment, making it difficult for election officials to administer elections.

Keywords: local election officials, election officials, election administration, social media, state and local politics, sentiment analysis