Jones County poll worker who mailed bomb threat to other elections staff gets prison
A Jones County poll worker will serve over a year in prison after admitting he made a bomb threat and made it look like it came from someone else, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Middle District of Georgia said Thursday.
Nicholas Wimbish, a 26-year-old Milledgeville man, was sentenced Thursday after admitting he had conveyed false information and made hoaxes earlier in the year. As a result, he was sentenced to a year and eight months in prison and fined $2,000.
After he serves his sentence, he will be under supervised release for an additional year.
U.S. Attorney William Keyes said that ensuring the security of polling sites is essential to election integrity.
“Americans must be able to express their political choices at the ballot box without fear of violence or harm,” Keyes said in a statement.
“These threats undermine the core values of our nation, and we will vigorously pursue justice in such matters,” Keyes said.
Mailed-in letter came from poll worker, feds say
Wimbish was working at the polls for the Jones County Elections Office in Gray on Oct. 16, 2024, when he got into a verbal altercation with a voter. The Jones County Elections superintendent received a letter on Oct. 22, 2024, purporting to be from a “Jones County voter” that targeted Wimbish and other poll workers, according to federal prosecutors.
Investigators determined Wimbish was actually the one who wrote the letter, and made it look like it came from someone else.
The letter said “your young liberal woke idiot Nicholas Wimbish (gave) me hell” and that he was trying to “influence people’s votes in line,” according to federal prosecutors.
Wimbish also wrote in the letter, which was meant to look like it came from someone else, “liberal young men will get a beatdown if they fight me.”
The letter also said people trying to fight the writer “will get the treason punishment by firing squad if they fight back,” federal prosecutors said.
Though the message was typewritten, at the bottom of the letter, a hand-written note stated that a “boom toy” would be at the early voting location, according to federal prosecutors.
When FBI agents asked Wimbish about it, he told them he believed a Jones County voter had sent the letter. However, after further investigation, agents discovered that Wimbish had researched himself and drafted the letter sent to the elections superintendent the night after the argument he had with the voter.
