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(WASHINGTON) — After federal prosecutors unsealed charges Wednesday against a Missouri man who allegedly sent a voicemail threat to an Arizona election official last year, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer confirmed the death threat and expressed confidence in the Justice Department task force on elections, despite the group’s indictments remaining in the single digits more than a year after it was formed.

“The reality is that all prosecution agencies receive gazillions more referrals than they have the capacity to investigate. So it is, perhaps, a result of shifting priorities within the department,” Richer told ABC News in a phone interview Wednesday. “It is an allocation of resources gain, and that’s not to say that they didn’t care about it previously, but this could signal a shift in priorities.”

Launched last year to address the rise in threats against election workers and officials, the task force, as of Aug. 1, has charged just four federal cases and joined one other case that was charged prior to its establishment. Richer’s case brings the total to six, with one conviction.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. said at the beginning of August that agents have reviewed over 1,000 so-called hostile contacts, and only a fraction of those, approximately 11%, met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation, amounting to roughly 100 probes. Though the task force has faced criticism for not more aggressively prosecuting threats against election...

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