Sponsors (18)
Introduced June 18, 2025 by Amy Klobuchar · Last progress June 18, 2025
The bill strengthens federal protections, funding, and enforcement to reduce threats and doxxing of election workers and to protect vote-counting, but it increases federal spending and administrative burdens while raising important free-speech, transparency, and federal–state balance concerns.
Election workers (officials, poll workers, volunteers) will have stronger federal legal protections and enforcement against threats, intimidation, and doxxing — including new criminal penalties and additional FBI/DOJ resources to investigate and prosecute those threats.
Federal grants will fund recruiting, training, and safety measures for state and local election offices, improving staffing, reducing shortages on election days, and supporting poll-worker safety.
Grants and program funding to redact or remove personally identifiable information (PII) from public records and upgrade databases will reduce doxxing and harassment risks to election workers and help jurisdictions modernize records protection.
Broad criminalization of 'intimidate' or 'coerce' and expanded authority to remove observers risk chilling lawful protest, political speech, or citizen monitoring and could be enforced inconsistently or overbroadly.
The bill increases federal spending — via open‑ended grant authorizations, new DOJ/FBI resource assignments, and training programs — which may raise taxpayer costs if offsets are not provided.
New compliance obligations (protecting PII, revising policies, training, database upgrades) and potential litigation create administrative and financial burdens for state and local election offices, especially smaller or under-resourced jurisdictions.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Creates federal crimes and penalties for threats or doxxing of election workers, funds grants and DOJ training to protect election workers' safety and PII, and allows removal of disruptive observers.
Creates new federal protections and programs to shield election officials, poll workers, and election volunteers from threats, doxxing, and intimidation. It funds and directs DOJ training and establishes grants to help states and localities protect personally identifiable information (PII) for people who administer Federal elections. Also creates a federal crime with fines and possible imprisonment for intimidating or retaliating against election workers, requires one FBI agent per field office to investigate such threats, clarifies that interference with ballot processing and result tabulation is covered by existing voter-protection rules, expands doxxing protections, and lets election officials remove disruptive or intimidating poll observers during Federal elections.