Sponsors (18)
Official title: Provide enhanced protections for election workers.
Introduced June 18, 2025 by Amy Klobuchar · Last progress June 18, 2025
The bill substantially strengthens legal protections, funding options, and federal enforcement to make it safer to serve in elections and to deter attacks on administrators, at the cost of expanding federal criminal jurisdiction and enforcement responsibilities, creating fiscal and administrative burdens, and raising risks of overbroad enforcement that could chill speech or produce federalism tensions.
Election workers (officials, poll workers, volunteers) will be more protected from threats, intimidation, and doxxing through new criminal penalties, explicit statutory protections, PII-redaction grants, and clearer removal authority, reducing harassment and safety risks for people who staff elections.
State and local election offices can access federal grants to recruit and train more election workers and upgrade databases/policies (including PII redaction), helping reduce staffing shortages, improve operations, and lower local implementation costs.
Federal law enforcement and prosecutors (DOJ, AUSAs, FBI) get clearer authority, specialized training, and reporting requirements to detect, investigate, and prosecute threats and doxxing against election workers, improving deterrence and accountability.
The bill expands federal criminal jurisdiction and enforcement over election‑related conduct (new offense, broader DOJ authority), which will likely increase federal prosecutions and place added workload and resource demands on DOJ/FBI and taxpayers while raising federalism concerns for states.
Broad new protections and removal authority risk chilling lawful speech, legitimate public‑interest disclosures, and ordinary political advocacy if enforcement is overbroad or subjective, and poll observers could be removed inconsistently across jurisdictions.
The federal grants, DOJ training programs, assignment of FBI personnel, and open-ended appropriations language will increase federal and local fiscal and administrative costs (including potential matching requirements and reporting burdens), which could strain budgets—especially in smaller or rural jurisdictions—and raise costs for taxpayers.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Strengthens federal protections for election workers: new DOJ training, grants to protect worker PII, a new federal crime for threats, expanded intimidation and doxxing coverage, and observer removal authority.
Creates new federal protections, training, grants, and criminal penalties to protect people who administer Federal elections. The bill directs DOJ to expand training and prosecutorial resources, establishes grant programs to protect election workers’ personally identifiable information, makes threatening or interfering with election workers a federal crime with fines and prison time, expands existing federal intimidation statutes to cover vote-processing workers, and lets state and local officials remove poll observers who are intimidating or disrupting vote-counting activities.