Election officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies: A new conspiracy theory theory emerges from the debunking of the egg
“For a while there, every six months, they’d come up with a new conspiracy theory. It would be debunked. They would have an egg on their face. Adams said they go back into their hole for six months. “You only get so many bites at that apple.”
In the face of that landscape, election officials say they are controlling what they can control. They have spent countless hours reaching out to skeptical voters over the past four years, and they’re now clinging onto hope that work will make a difference in people’s willingness to accept election results.
“Think about the devastating effect it’d have if somebody uses an AI image of what looks like an election official somehow destroying ballots or, you know, breaking into a drop box,” he said. That kind of imagery can cause violence in a close election if it stirs up feelings of distrust in our system.
The Challenge of Watching Election Fraud Detection on Social Media and Social Networks: An Empirical Analysis of Musk, Richer, and Other Public Advocates
X is the most glaring example, but other platforms have also backed away from the more aggressive stance they took in 2020, cut back on the number of people working on trust and safety, and are generally more quiet about the work they are doing. Meta now lets Facebook and Instagram users opt out of some features of its fact-checking program, while its text-based social network, Threads, has deemphasized news and politics.
Officials charged with safeguarding voting say they’ve learned and are applying many lessons from 2016 and 2020 — but are also confronting a new set of challenges this year, including advances in artificial intelligence that make it easier and cheaper to generate realistic but fake images, video, audio and text, and the emergence of X owner Elon Musk as a leading Trump surrogate, donor and amplifier of election fraud conspiracy theories.
“We try to not commit unforced errors,” said Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder in Maricopa County, Ariz., who has been an outspoken debunker of election lies. “But at the end of the day, if somebody really wants to make something look weird, I think they can do it, unfortunately.”
With less than a week left of voting, the election cycle has entered a fraught stage in which rumors, misleading claims and conspiracy theories are surging. When polls close, election administrators, intelligence officials and researchers don’t expect that to end. They are bracing for what is expected to be a contentious period of counting and certifying votes, in which discord fueled by foreign and domestic sources could be corrosive to democracy.
She said that if you take a picture of something and post it online, it could be misinterpreted so quickly and not take into account the many remedies that are available.
Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, said such “evidence generation infrastructure” is more robust this year. Even when these efforts identify real issues with voting, they tend to ignore the checks in the system that catch problems, she said.
When election officials try to correct Musk’s false claims, he has lashed out. According to CBS News, the Secretary of State of Michigan said she received threats and harassing messages after Musk called her a liar over his claim that the state has more eligible citizens than registered voters.
Musk has become a major vector for baseless claims that Democrats are bringing in immigrants to illegally vote for them — a conspiracy theory Trump and other Republicans have embraced and are using to lay the groundwork to claim the election was stolen should he lose.
Election Security and Communications: A Case Study in Makhija, Bowens, and Washington County, Fla. Using Social Media to Prevent Election Misinformation
In Montgomery County, Pa., Neil Makhija fashioned a voting ice cream truck to travel his county and help people vote. Cramer, in Charleston County, co-wrote a children’s book. Derek Bowens, in Durham County, N.C., created an app that could deliver accurate election information directly to people there.
Carolina Lopez, a former election official from Miami-Dade County, Fla. says that trying to fight fire on social media has felt like a losing battle for years.
“The government needs to get this information out as quickly as possible, because literally the stakes are nothing less than our democracy,” Warner told NPR.
Warner wrote an open letter last month asking for help in identifying and respond to election misinformation and to coordinate communications between the government, tech companies and researchers.
According to Cramer, it’s important to get the message out there first so that we are as proactive as possible.
Local election officials are trying harder than ever to get the attention of the media and the public about their processes. State election officials in a number of swing states have started holding multiple press conferences per week leading up to Nov. 5.
“What we are really trying to encourage them to do is to know that it is your state and local election official that is the signal through that noise,” Conley said.
There’s no sign of foreign adversaries breaching election or voting systems so far. But attackers don’t have to succeed in order to undermine confidence, Conley, the election security expert, said.
DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI have issued joint public service announcements alerting Americans to tactics foreign actors might use to discredit the election, including ransomware attacks or falsely claiming to have hacked voter registration systems.
In September, the Justice Department seized web domains it says Russian operatives used to spoof American news outlets and spread fake stories, indicted employees of Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT in a scheme to fund right-wing pro-Trump American influencers, and brought criminal charges against Iranian hackers accused of targeting the Trump campaign.
The video is not real. The envelopes and ballots shown don’t match what that county actually uses to vote. The US officials said it was spread to sow doubts about the election.
Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies
Defending Russian and Israeli Corrupt Practices in the 21st Century: An Analysis with the National Propagation Research Council (NPR)
“Our adversaries know that misinformation and disinformation is cheap and effective,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, in an interview with NPR.
This year, Russia is angling to boost Trump, as it did in the previous two presidential elections, while Iran is trying to undermine the former president, the intelligence community and private sector researchers say. China is targeting down-ballot races but does not appear to have a preference in the presidential election. All three regularly seize on divisive issues, from immigration to abortion to Israel’s war in Gaza, to exacerbate discord among Americans. They have been using artificial intelligence to create more misleading content.
This year, law enforcement and federal intelligence agencies are more assertive in calling out foreign incursions. It’s a stark difference from 2016, when the Obama administration was reticent to make public information about the full scope of Russia’s efforts favoring Trump until after the election.
“Going into the 2024 election cycle, we are arguably facing the most complex threat environment compared to a prior cycle,” said Cait Conley, who oversees election security efforts within the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber agency, in an interview with NPR.
“If I lose — I’ll tell you what, it’s possible. Because they cheat. That’s the only way we’re gonna lose, because they cheat,” Trump said at a September rally in Michigan.
Even though courts and investigations have found no evidence of election fraud, former President Donald Trump continues to claim he won the election. Should he lose again this year, he will reject the results.
Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies
The Clemson Operation: Confronting a Russian Voting Propaganda Campaign with the Media Forensics Hub
Linvill traced the video back to a Russian propaganda operation, first identified by Clemson, that has also spread faked videos targeting Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in recent weeks.
The campaign is fighting a tough battle, according to a co- director of the media forensics hub. “I’m sure that they often feel like they’re trying to put their finger in the dike before it bursts.”
The deck is stacked against voting officials online and it’s only going to get worse in 2020. Hundreds of thousands of people viewed the fake video after it was posted. A statement from Bucks County debunking it three hours later was shared on X fewer than 100 times.
Last week, a video began circulating on X, purporting to show a person in Pennsylvania ripping up ballots that were marked for President Donald Trump and the Vice President, and leaving them for Harris.
This is not a list of protections in place for a visit by the president of the United States nor the contents of a shipment to frontline troops fighting in Ukraine. In order to protect voters ahead of Tuesday’s election, election officials in many counties across the US have had to put in place security measures that have never been done before.
The county, which is the fourth largest county in the nation, became ground zero for election denial conspiracists in recent years, after GOP lawmakers sanctioned a bogus recount in 2021, run by the Florida company Cyber Ninjas.
The city of Maricopa has put in place more security measures in the past. “We’re a fortress now,” Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County Recorder, told WIRED back in February, outlining how he had to navigate security fencing, metal detectors, and security checks in order to get into his office.