By Catalina Clarke
Catalina Clarke is Editor-in-Chief of The Library Media.
The two polling places that bomb threats shut or emptied on Election Day sit about twenty-five miles apart.
The first is Beverly Elementary School in Toledo, Ohio. The second is Carlson High School in Gibraltar, Michigan. Between them runs one of the flattest, straightest stretches of Interstate 75 in America, along the western shore of Lake Erie — and a state line. On one side of that line is Ohio. On the other is Michigan. Both are states the whole country watches on election night, and on Tuesday, both had a polling place emptied by a phone call.
Toledo, in the morning. Two threats were called in to Beverly Elementary School at about 10:30 AM Eastern. The building was evacuated and the polling place closed for one hour and fifteen minutes, according to Lucas County Board of Elections Deputy Director Tim Monaco. A K-9 sweep found nothing; police cleared the site at about 12:15 PM Eastern and voting resumed, according to Toledo Public Schools spokeswoman Patty Mazur, reported by USA TODAY and the Akron Beacon Journal. At least four other area schools received threats the same morning — Monac Elementary in Toledo, Conneaut and Kenwood Elementary in Bowling Green, and schools in the Lake Local district — and a 3:00 PM Eastern update from the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center confirms none of them was used for voting.
Gibraltar, in the afternoon. Hours later and one state north, a bomb threat was called in to Carlson High School in Gibraltar, Michigan, on Tuesday afternoon. The school serves as the polling location for Precincts 8 and 11 in Brownstown Township. Authorities evacuated the building, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office swept the structure, and voting was moved outside while police worked, according to the Brownstown Township Police Department, reported by The Detroit News via Monroe News and by WDIV Local 4 in Detroit. Gibraltar and Brownstown Township police are both aiding the investigation. No clearance time has been announced. No injuries have been reported at either location.
One corridor. It is worth being plain about the map, because the map is the fact. Toledo is a border city: the Michigan line runs along its northern edge. Drive north on I-75 and you cross into Michigan within minutes, pass Monroe, and reach the Downriver communities — Brownstown, Gibraltar, Trenton — that form Detroit’s southern suburbs. Detroit itself is about twenty miles beyond Gibraltar. The two threatened schools sit in a single continuous corridor of towns along one interstate and one lakeshore, in what is effectively one metropolitan region that happens to be divided by a state line into two of the most closely watched states in American politics. Michigan has a Senate seat and all of its House seats on today’s ballot; Ohio has a Senate seat and its House seats as well. Voters in both states were already being watched by about 1,000 Justice Department monitors and observers deployed nationwide.
What is not known. No official has said the two threats are connected. No official has attributed either one — to a person, a group, or a country. Police in neither state have stated whether the calls were credible or hoaxes, and this desk will not guess. The history is a matter of record and it is only history: on Election Day 2024, hoax bomb threats were directed at polling places in several battleground states, and the FBI said many appeared to originate from Russian email domains. Nothing released on Tuesday supports applying that sentence to Tuesday’s calls, and investigators have not done so.
What the calls did and did not do. In Toledo, voting stopped for seventy-five minutes and then resumed inside the building. In Gibraltar, voting did not stop; it moved outdoors. In both places, election workers and police treated the threats as real until they were cleared, and in both places the count will go on tonight. A phone call can empty a school. On the evidence of Tuesday, along twenty-five miles of interstate in two swing states, that is all it can do.
From The Library — the estate of our family.