WaPo:

Any thought they’d had that the atmosphere might calm down was gone. What amounted to a grass-roots uprising had gained momentum, become more organized and started coming after the election office.

New people had been showing up for the county commission meetings — not the old-guard Floyd County Republicans but the Greene wing that had all but taken over the party. They accused the election board of being corrupt and controlled by Democrats. They unearthed a private photo of the election board chairwoman holding a Trump mug in one hand and raising a middle finger in the other, blew it up poster-size and displayed it at a meeting as evidence that she was biased. They demanded a state review of the election office, and when nothing happened, one of them contacted the owner of a bus plastered with photos of Trump and the words, “Ready for Round 3 2021,” who drove it to Rome, parking outside the yellow brick building in a show of force. Increasingly, they zeroed in on Waddell.

“Any background checks done on Vanessa Waddell,” read an open-records request.

“Any and all available job applications for Vanessa Waddell,” read another.

She listened as a man claimed she had committed more than 150 violations related to the Jan. 5 Senate election. She sat there as others questioned whether her high school diploma was fake and whether her college degree was legitimate. A man said that he was “disgusted” by her handling of the election. A woman complained that she had been “staring” at her during meetings. “I began to be concerned about her intent,” the woman told the commissioners. “I asked two individuals to keep an eye on the situation.”

Then one morning, three people who’d been among the most vocal at the meetings showed up at the plexiglass window of the election office.

One of them began taking a cellphone video. The two others went down the hallway to a small room where the voting equipment was stored, wedged open the door, and took more videos as Spurlin, terrified, told them they had to leave. Waddell alerted county officials, who called the police, who showed up after the three were gone, took a report and told her there was nothing else they could do.

After that, the office in the basement had felt like a bunker. Spurlin began carrying pepper spray. Mosley bought a stun gun and began checking the hands of people who showed up in the plexiglass window. Waddell considered bringing her gun to work.

When she went upstairs for the meetings, she began sitting against the wall for security, thinking that she’d eventually hear some sort of reassurance from the county commissioners. But on a Tuesday in November, what she heard was that the governor had signed a bill remaking election administration in Floyd County. Instead of a three- member nonpartisan board, she would now have to answer to a new five-member board that was explicitly partisan — two Democrats and three Republicans, including one she recognized as a leading critic of her office and two others she worried held the same views.

By the end of the month, the old election board was dissolved. Two weeks after that, the county commission unanimously approved the new board. And after that, county officials told Waddell with little explanation that she would be reverting to her old job in voter registration. It was unclear whether anyone in the election office would have jobs once the new board was sworn in, because they’d all have to reapply. The word they kept hearing was “gutted.”

“That’s what somebody upstairs said,” Mosley was saying. “This whole office needs to be gutted.”