Washington, DC – Vanessa Montgomery will not return to her role as a voting site manager during this year’s United States presidential election.
Her reason? “It’s just a lot,” she told Al Jazeera, speaking from her home state of Georgia.
The 61-year-old is a veteran of the state’s elections. Since 2015, Montgomery served Bartow County, northwest of Atlanta, directly overseeing a polling site over the last five years. It was her job to make sure voting went smoothly.
But, for many election officials and poll workers, 2020 represented a turning point.
Montgomery was among the many election employees who faced threats — and even violence — as a result of false claims of voter fraud.
Much of those claims were coming from a high-profile source: then-President Donald Trump. In the aftermath of his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump unleashed a deluge of falsehoods that cast doubt on his loss and spurred public scepticism towards how the voting was run.
Fast forward four years, and Trump is once again seeking re-election, as the Republican nominee for the presidency.
But Montgomery will no longer be there to supervise Bartow County’s polling stations. She fears this presidential election will be as tense as the last, particularly since Trump has already begun to sow doubt about the result.
“It might not be, but I do believe it’s gonna be a rough one,” she told Al Jazeera.