The State Officials Defending the Midterms from the President 

This article first appeared in The New Yorker.

Now and then, not often, Deidre Henderson will still work up the nerve to drive herself to the market for milk or bread. She will sit in the parking lot in her big S.U.V., engine running, doors locked, ruminating on risk. Generally, she heads home without getting out of the car.

Henderson, who is fifty-two years old, is the lieutenant governor of Utah, a Republican midway through her second term. That makes her the state’s chief election officer. (Elsewhere, the responsibility most commonly falls to a secretary of state.) It also makes her a target. Along with her counterparts in dozens of other states, Henderson has refused to allow the Trump Administration to obtain state voter rolls and to oversee the removal of voters it deems unqualified, in advance of the midterms, on November 3rd. For that resistance, election conspiracists have deluged her with threats of sexual violence and murder.

“It’s scary,” she told me late this summer. “It’s horrible. Honestly, I’ve had to have counselling just to function, to deal with the burden of fear that comes from the threats I’ve been getting.”

Read the full article in The New Yorker >>