The Justice Department told Americans on Monday to cool their anger against election officials and workers as the country approaches the November vote, and warned in particular against attempts to use artificial intelligence to conduct the threats.
Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered the caution at a meeting of his election task force, decrying a “dangerous increase” in the number of threats that his department has seen over the last few years, with many of them tracing back to the contentious 2020 election.
The department characterized the cases as a threat to democracy.
“The public servants who administer our elections must be able to do their jobs without fearing for their safety or that of their families,” Mr. Garland said.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said they fear people will use AI to try to hide election disruption activities and said harnessing AI for nefarious purposes will net perpetrators even stiffer sentences.
“Violent threats using AI are still violent threats,” she said.
She worried that people will use AI to try to shield their identities while making threats or harness it to feed misinformation.
The warnings came with less than six months to go before the election, which at the presidential level is a rematch of the 2020 race that saw Democrat Joseph R. Biden unseat then-President Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, has maintained his stance that the election was stolen from him, either through illegally cast and counted ballots or through pandemic-era election changes that ushered in much more relaxed ballot rules.
As the November election approaches, both parties are already sniping over the outlines of the electorate and ballot rules.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee announced Monday it is probing Mr. Biden’s executive order on promoting access to voting, saying the attempt to harness federal agencies to try to expand the pool of voters and see where federal employees themselves might play a role.
Oversight Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican, said the Constitution generally leaves voting matters to the states.
He pointed to a section of the federal directive that promotes registration and voting of convicted felons as a potential source of confusion since some states have a general ban on felons regaining the right to vote.
Mr. Comer also said the Biden administration has refused to reveal to him what third-party voting organizations it is inviting into government agency buildings to promote voting.
“If the Biden administration wants to use taxpayer-funded buildings to allow ‘nonpartisan third-party organizations’ to engage in voter registration, then the American people deserve to know who these organizations are,” Mr. Comer wrote in a letter demanding answers from the president’s budget director.
The Biden Justice Department, though, saw a different set of threats.
Mr. Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray focused on threats of violence to poll workers with the attorney general ticking off specific prosecutions that netted prison time.
That includes Andrew Nickels, who earlier this year pleaded guilty to threatening an election official in Michigan in 2020. Tina Barton, the official whom Nickels threatened, was a Republican serving as city clerk in Rochester Hills. Nickels appeared to have been angered by Ms. Barton’s statement that the 2020 election wasn’t plagued by irregularities.
Ms. Barton has since joined the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which says it is fighting a growing tide of election threats.
“I am one of the election officials that had my life and the lives of my family members threatened. It’s been nearly two years. The rhetoric has not stopped. The threats have not ceased,” she said.