Nancy Boren has overseen elections in Muscogee County, Georgia, for nearly three decades, but her job has changed dramatically in recent years.

Just a couple of weeks before his interview with Scripps News, Boren received an alarming text message. The message read in part: “People who resist manual counting should imagine January 6 at home. “Once mobs and riots break out, they take on a life of their own.”

“It worried me, but I probably didn’t take it as seriously as I should have,” Boren said of the message. “And I think that’s a trait that many of us have as election officials. “We receive them, but we don’t take them seriously because we can’t believe it would ever happen to us.”

In 2020, Georgia became a hotbed of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the election process and results. Election officials and poll workers across the state were subjected to harassment and even death threats. Now, security procedures have been updated.

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Boren gave Scripps News a tour of their facility, which features a panic button in the main office. A second button is located further inside the facility, behind a locked door.

“We don’t want them to stay in front,” Boren explained. “If they have to hit the panic button, we want them to get to safety.”

Law enforcement is also an important part of the equation.

“The Georgia Sheriff’s Office is responsible for all government buildings and elections,” said Muscogee County Deputy Sheriff Thomas Medlin. “So our patrol units are constantly traveling from district to district throughout the day, every 30 to 45 minutes.”

Asked if he ever thought securing elections would be part of his job, Medlin said, “No.”

“I took it for granted,” he said. “This is an institution and always has been and always will be.”

One of the most extreme emergency measures Boren’s office has taken is in the event of exposure to fentanyl through the mail.

“Every county has Narcan. I would never have thought an election official would need Narcan,” Boren said as he opened a small blue bag of the counteracting medication that was distributed to election officials in every county in Georgia. “We’re not specifically worried about it, but we’re prepared if we get it.”

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He also invested several thousand dollars in GPS trackers for the voting bags and showed a live update on his computer of where each of the trackers was on a map of Muscogee County.

“We felt it was important to be able to track the ballots, as that is the official record of the vote from the polling place to the central tabulation,” Boren said. “And we bought the tracker so we could do that.”

To learn more about these drastic changes and how Georgia is working to keep poll workers and voters safe, Scripps News traveled to Atlanta to speak with Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State.

“Fulton County received a fentanyl-laden letter earlier this year,” Sterling said, referring to the November 2023 incident when election offices in several states received suspicious letters, some of which contained the deadly drug. “So, we’ve distributed Narcan to all 159 counties and then we’ve trained for all of that.”

“We partner with the Department of Homeland Security and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency to inspect every site that contains our election equipment,” Sterling said. “There was an office, Homeland came and they had a bunch of windows in front and they told them they had to park their cars here in the front. Because? It’s the front of the windows, basically to block any bombs. And that’s the level we have to deal with in this. “

When asked how concerned he was about misinformation and disinformation about the election leading to physical threats, Sterling responded: “My biggest concern, I’ve been saying this for two years, isn’t some militia getting together to march “More

Sterling also addressed the broader commentary on increased security measures over the past four years and what that means for democracy in the United States.

“Understand, we’ve been like this before. It’s not the end of the world. Is it terrible? Yes. The things we don’t have, we never had to think about for a while. Yes, we will get through it. Georgia is resilient. Voters are resilient. America is resilient. And I have faith and optimism that we will get through this.”

With early voting underway, Muscogee County voters who spoke with Scripps News said they feel confident casting their ballot.

“We have very brave and very committed poll workers,” Boren said. “We have a great group of people and they’re not really worried right now.”