Mom was up at the crack of dawn on Election Day.

Not because she wanted to be first in line to vote. She had a more compelling reason.

As captain of the team of volunteer poll workers, she needed to be at City Hall, just across the street, before the voters started pouring in at 7 a.m. Always a stickler for details, Mom wanted everything ship-shape before the most important day of our democracy began.

Her biggest challenge at the end of the day was to ensure each vote was counted and that the number of votes matched the number of signatures in that big voter registry document.

If there was no match, sometimes she would not be home until after midnight, working until the “error” was resolved.

Imagine her horror if she was still doing that public service today.

Accounting snafus are now replaced with death threats to those working the elections.

Ask Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson about that ugly change of events.

“We are in an era of political violence,” she laments.

And the host of physical and verbal attacks on poll workers has, in and of itself, taken its own toll.

In the last several years, 90,000 of those senior poll volunteers have packed it in.

Of course, not all of them feared those threats, but enough told the secretary that that was the reason.

“Many,” she recounts. “We can’t deny that the rise of the rancor at this moment is real and could lead to an uptick in violent threats against those who are running our elections in the state, and I remain concerned. It continues to be trying to see these everyday men and women continue under such stress and pressure.”

Despite that mountain of resignation slips, the state has managed to reassemble a new workforce to prevent the shutdown of voting stations around the state. This past year, 15,000 new faces were on the voter assembly line, hoping against hope that peace prevailed.

This past primary day, voting saw only a handful of would-be threatening situations, the Secretary of State’s Office reports, as just over 2 million residents got in the game, out of 7 million who were registered. The vast majority were safe and those who voted during the nine-day early voting window did so without long lines.

But November’s vote will be a whole new ball game.

Five to 6 million more voters.

More possible allegations of voter fraud a la the 2020 balloting.

And more hopes and maybe even some prayers from the state’s chief elections officer, Benson, that threats are few and far between.

Needless to say, what a relief that Mom won’t have to be up at the crack of dawn to be part of that new “era of violence.”