Election Turmoil Comes to a Rural County

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May’s Republican primary runoff in Montgomery County seemed an unlikely target for outrage over election integrity. 

Fewer than 500 people in the county, which is off the beaten path and home to most of the Uwharrie National Forest, voted that day. Statewide, there were so few votes that precinct numbers were shielded to protect voter identities.

Nevertheless, county elections director Rhonda Johnson drew online ire after Margaret “Margo” Ackiss, a conservative activist 300 miles away in Murphy, took to TikTok in August and lodged accusations against her, including that Johnson counted ballots at night by herself. The chair of the local election board says that’s not true.  

Ackiss has over 150,000 followers on the platform—six times the population of Montgomery County. Commenters called for Johnson to be fired from her job or even imprisoned. One attacked her looks. Others called her a “bitch” and a “crook.”

Two suggested she should be hanged. “I have a tree and a rope!!!!!! treason!!!!!” one read. 

Johnson, 55, is still shaken. She’s worked in elections for two decades but said she’s never had someone take to social media to scrutinize her in that way before. She’s also fighting breast cancer and had posted a photo of herself on Facebook in August wearing a new wig.

“I’m really down right now, and I’m scared,” Johnson said in a recent interview. “It hurt me a lot to think that somebody that did not even know me but could read what I was going through would pull my pictures to put me on a TikTok video.”

Teddi Benson, chair of the Montgomery County Board of Elections, told The Assembly that most of what Ackiss said was inaccurate. But the board had other issues with Johnson’s leadership and has moved to dismiss her, the Montgomery Herald reported. The State Board of Elections will have the final say. 

State and local elections officials once kept a low profile, but that’s changed since Donald Trump claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump still makes that claim regularly, as do many of his followers, who have dialed up the pressure on elections officials.  

Eighty-five percent of North Carolina’s county elections directors said threats against elections workers have increased since 2020, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Lab survey found. A quarter said they’ve personally been threatened.

The intense scrutiny is driving some out of elections altogether. Two-thirds of county directors have left their positions since 2019, data from the State Board of Elections show. 

“It’s a frightening thing,” said Jason Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the survey. “We can’t have safe, secure elections if we don’t have people who want to run them.”

TikTok Accusations

Montgomery County’s primary runoff was troubled, according to local Board of Elections meeting minutes, which referred to “a series of very unfortunate events that [the board wants] to make sure doesn’t happen again.”

In Wadeville, eight miles from the county seat of Troy, residents voted at a red-roofed volunteer fire station that overlooks a small pond. The station was under renovation, and the only accessible bathroom was a portable toilet, Johnson said. Precinct workers, unhappy with the conditions, wanted to leave. 

The minutes said other workers filled in, including a mother and daughter, who wasn’t a state resident. It’s against state law for relatives to be precinct workers together or for a precinct worker to live out of state. 

But Ackiss, who declined to comment for this article, made other claims about Johnson. Ackiss said the director counted the primary provisional ballots by herself in the middle of the night. Benson, the chair, said that’s not true. 

Ackiss also said Johnson gave people unauthorized access to voting machines, which Johnson denied. 

In a later TikTok, Ackiss rebuffed accusations that she’s spreading misinformation, attributing the entire version of events to Tammy Dunn, the editor of the Montgomery Herald. Dunn told The Assembly that she never spoke with Ackiss and can’t verify her claims.

In the initial video Ackiss posted, she included a photo of Johnson from Facebook. Johnson, who has breast cancer, posted the photo in August of herself wearing a wig. 

“My new look,” Johnson wrote in the caption. “Chemo took my hair.”

Ackiss said Johnson’s cancer had nothing to do with the video and said the idea that she’s calling attention to it is “abhorrent.” 

“I’ve had cancer three times, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody,” Ackiss said in another TikTok. “And I by no means would be demeaning to Miss Rhonda for having cancer.”

“If she can’t do her job because she has cancer, maybe she should resign.”

The Cherokee Scout reported in March that a Cherokee County woman had sued Ackiss for libel and slander after Ackiss repeatedly criticized her on social media in a dispute involving the local Republican Party. Ackiss has denied the lawsuit’s allegations. 

A veterans group supporting former President Donald Trump named Ackiss its state operations director in January and said she also was a district captain in Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor. 

“Margaret is respected as [a] political pundit and powerful presence in North Carolina conservative politics leveraging her social media platforms to engage and advocate for North Carolina conservatism and President Donald Trump,” the group said.  

Into the Spotlight

In counties rural and urban, red and blue, North Carolina’s elections directors are reckoning with what they say has been a radical transformation of their work environment. 

For years, elections officials toiled in obscurity, said Damon Circosta, who chaired the State Board of Elections as a Democrat from 2019 to 2023. But after 2020, Trump’s insistence that the election was riddled with wrongdoing pushed local elections workers into the spotlight.  

Now, Circosta said, “half the world thinks you’re upholding democracy; the other half thinks you’re ending it.”

Some elections workers have been confronted in the grocery store, said State Board of Elections director Karen Brinson Bell. Others have been followed home after working the polls. Recently, North Carolina was one of more than 20 states that received a suspicious package targeting elections officials. 

“Someone will be murdered,” one person told office staff on the phone in 2022, according to Brinson Bell. Though the call was frightening, she said law enforcement didn’t consider it a threat that would rise to the level of prosecution because it wasn’t directed at a specific person.

Circosta said he received chilling messages but never a direct threat. He said he remembers emails along the lines of, “You know what happens to traitors in a just society,” and “I hope your kids sleep well at night.” 

Current and former local elections officials said most common are outbursts from people who call the elections office or appear in person, often spewing profanities or demanding access to confidential records. 

The Washington Post reported that across the country, local elections officials have made more than 2,000 reports of disruptive protesters and menacing emails, messages, and social media posts. 

“Half the world thinks you’re upholding democracy; the other half thinks you’re ending it.”

Damon Circosta, former chair of the State Board of Elections

“What’s really so disturbing about that is, all of our meetings are open,” said Susie Jordan, Iredell County elections director. “Anytime we’re testing machines, that’s open to the public; anytime we’re doing a sample audit, that’s open to the public. But nobody comes.” 

Many harassers are fueled by misinformation, Jordan said, and it feels impossible to reason with them.  

“There’s winners and losers in ballgames; there’s winners and losers in elections,” Brinson Bell said. “Shouting at the referees and saying hostile, ugly things to a referee in a sporting event gets you no further, and it shouldn’t get you any further with being able to throw those same accusations and that hostility towards an election official.”

Emotional Impact

For nearly a decade, Meloni Wray worked what she said was her dream job as Craven County elections director. But after she had a heart attack, which she attributed to inherited conditions, at age 55 in January 2021, she was racked with anxiety watching the state of elections across the country.

Though she had strong relationships with community groups and took pride in building confidence in county elections, Wray said the future of elections felt too turbulent to continue. Online misinformation became impossible to combat, she said, and she worried that the stress would affect her health. She resigned in June 2022. 

“I hated it because it was a job I loved,” Wray said.

In coastal Carteret County, where Trump won 70 percent of the vote in 2020, elections director Caitlin Sabadish said her office still gets accused of throwing elections. She said she now fields complicated public records requests from skeptics that only exacerbate the pressure of an already stressful job. It takes a toll on her mental health, she said.

“I don’t have time to do the work that I actually have to do because I’m wasting my time with these ridiculous accusations,” Sabadish said.  

Roberts, the UNC-CH professor, said the job of an elections official has reached a critical inflection point: Investments in elections have stagnated while the job has grown more demanding. In his survey, 88 percent of county elections directors said job-related stress had increased since they started. 

“I don’t have time to do the work that I actually have to do because I’m wasting my time with these ridiculous accusations.”  

Caitlin Sabadish, Carteret County elections director

Several elections directors who’ve faced harassment said they felt disheartened by allegations of election malfeasance. To some, it feels like a personal attack.  

Kathy Holland, who worked in Alamance County elections for 34 years (including 18 as director), received a death threat and a torrent of menacing emails from people who demanded the county extend early voting hours in 2016. 

“God will punish you for your failure to do the right thing and have a fair election and I hope the good Lord will strike you dead if you fail to treat every citizen equally,” one email read, according to local Board of Elections meeting minutes. Others told her she was “being watched.”

But Holland was most stung by the idea that she would try to suppress voters, she said. 

“You dedicate your life to this process, and you know you’re doing the right thing,” Holland said. “To know that not only does somebody not have faith in what you’re doing, [but] they think you’re doing something wrong—that, I think, was more upsetting than anything.” 

Security Precautions

As the November election nears, officials are bracing for new threats. In Carteret County, Sabadish said she got panic buttons for office staff. She worries that’s not enough. 

“There is no physical barrier between us and the public; there is no key code entry or locked doors or anything,” Sabadish said. “The environment that we’re in now, I’ve had to second-guess that, and second-guess the safety of the staff.”

Through the State Board of Elections, Sabadish said she connected with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which visited the Carteret office last month to identify ways to improve its security. Any physical changes to the space will likely be expensive, she said, so she has to work with the county to find room in the budget.  

Durham County elections director Derek Bowens said along with equipping each precinct chief judge with a panic button badge, elections staff will use a GPS tracking system to locate precinct officials. His office built a custom dashboard that displays each official’s location, which GPS pings every three seconds, alongside his or her emergency contact information, car model, and license plate so law enforcement can respond quickly if something goes awry. 

To make sure each chief judge gets safely from the precinct to the Board of Elections operations center, a precinct judge of the opposite political party—a “tailer,” Bowens called it—will follow each one. 

Bowens said the new security measures, which public records show cost over $20,000, were partly prompted by an incident during the March primary when a person arrived to vote at a county precinct after polls closed. 

“If I can’t vote with a ballot, I will vote with a bullet,” the person told poll workers, according to the incident report. Workers never got the person’s name, so Bowens said nothing came of it.

Brinson Bell, the state director, said election workers are now better prepared for crisis situations. The state has done training for county offices on de-escalation and mental health, she said, and officials have an idea of what concerns to expect.

“You dedicate your life to this process, and you know you’re doing the right thing.” 

Kathy Holland, former director of elections in Alamance County

And the intense scrutiny of elections from some has coincided with an encouraging interest in the electoral process and election safety from others, said Holland, the former Alamance County elections director.

Bowens and Holland are both members of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which works to join law enforcement and elections officials for bipartisan efforts to strengthen election security. 

Circosta, the former chair of the state board, sits on the advisory board of an organization that connects elections officials to no-cost legal support called the Election Official Legal Defense Network. Both groups were formed in the wake of the 2020 election.

Three-fourths of North Carolinians are “very” or “somewhat” confident that their vote will be accurately counted in the upcoming election, an August Catawba College and YouGov survey found. 

Election Drama

Troy, with a population of 3,000, is the largest town in Montgomery County. The county Board of Elections office is tucked behind three white concrete arches in a central spot on the town’s Main Street, which is lined with American flags.

Down the road, Shirley Harris, a former county Democratic Party chair and a retired teacher, sat on a folding chair in party headquarters last week. Local leaders in Montgomery County have long whispered about elections drama, she said. 

“You can get up to here in this kind of stuff,” Harris said, motioning to her knees. 

Harris, 73, knows the history and players well. She taught many when they were elementary schoolers, she said as she pored over the list of precinct judges for the upcoming election. 

It wasn’t until after the first TikTok about Johnson, the director, that casual onlookers started paying attention. The next day, it was the subject of a weekly podcast hosted by two locals, who called it “misinformation.”  

Montgomery County residents “seek news like people in the desert seek water,” said Brooke Crump, a former attorney and political candidate. She directed people to read the local Board of Elections meeting minutes. “You can do this, and you should when you see a TikTok that says there’s been voter fraud where you live.” 

Harris saw the TikTok on Facebook. She dismissed it as inaccurate. But she said Johnson’s relationship with the board has grown taut, punctuated by spats over mishaps that seemed to pile up. 

“The ship was loose,” Harris said. “That ship in Wadeville was rocking for sure, and it’s been rocking in other places.” 

Kelsey Brown, the county’s Republican Party chair, said, “There’s a pattern of [Johnson] losing her temper and being not so nice to people.”

The governor appoints the five members of the State Board of Elections. There can’t be more than three members of the same party. 

The governor also appoints the chair of each county board, and the state board appoints the other four members. Three of the five board members in Montgomery County are Democrats. Johnson, who makes $59,206 a year and oversees one full-time staff member, is registered as unaffiliated. 

The Assembly obtained a May email from Benson, the board chair, that shows the board discussed “several disturbing incidents” during that month’s runoff and asked a former Democratic Party chair for evidence of Johnson’s behavior to share with the State Board of Elections. 

“The board is more than ready for a change in personnel,” Benson wrote. She declined to answer questions about Johnson’s performance.

The Montgomery Herald reported on September 25 that the local board had recommended Johnson’s dismissal. After Brinson Bell, the state director, received the request for termination, Johnson had 15 days to respond. 

Brinson Bell then has 20 days to decide whether to terminate Johnson. That decision will likely come in the last week of October. The state board could decide to defer Brinson Bell’s decision within 20 days, which means it would hold a hearing and make the final call. 

A state board spokesperson said it can’t confirm or discuss a personnel issue.

Now, with less than a month until Election Day, the status of the county’s top elections professional is uncertain. 

“I have dedicated 20 years of life to this job, sitting here now fighting cancer, come back after three weeks after a total mastectomy,” Johnson said, choking back tears. “I was supposed to be out six. I brought my tail back in here after three to run this office for these people in this county, and this is what my board thinks of me?”

Johnson said she’s done her job with integrity. And until she hears otherwise, she’s staying.

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Emily Vespa is a freelance journalist and a recent graduate of North Carolina State University.