The Network of Foreign Election Accounts That Are Claimed at Changing the U.S. Presidential Elections and Implications for Overseas Voting
The network of accounts was not known who is behind them. Influence operations run by foreign governments are known to amplify domestic tensions to drive up tension and chaos in the U.S.
The researcher got a push notification about a post even though he didn’t follow the account. The posts have also circulated on the Telegram messaging app, where they have been promoted by accounts that share Russian propaganda, and the message board 4chan, ISD said.
Many of the posts shared the same language and images, which is a sign that accounts are coordinated. The phrase “Democrats had it coming for not enforcing voter ID laws” is repeated. Republicans in many states have long pushed for stricter voter ID laws.
While many of the accounts that we identified boasted that they voted for Trump in swing states, there are still some baseless claims made about overseas voting that frame Trump as the victim of illegal votes cast.
The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA, lets states set up systems to allow military members and American citizens living overseas to vote. The law allegations are part of a larger narrative that says the election will be stolen from Trump because of weak voting laws and the chance that non-citizens will vote in big numbers and swing the presidential race.
ISD said that the first post from the network was published on Oct. 22, not long after Republicans filed lawsuits challenging overseas voters’ ballots in a few swing states. Some overseas voters had their eligibility cast doubt on by those lawsuits. Trump falsely claimed in a social media post in September that Democrats intended to use overseas ballots to “CHEAT” and manipulate the election results. The lawsuits haven’t succeeded in the courts.
A network of accounts on the social media site X claims to be foreign nationals who have illegally voted in the U.S. presidential election, according to new research from the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Election workers in Pennsylvania won’t destroy Trump mail-in ballots. The Department of Defense doesn’t allow US soldiers to use lethal force against Trump supporters if he loses next week. 180,000 Amish people did not register in Pennsylvania to vote, because there are less than 100,000 Amish in the state. Ron DeSantis did not say that Florida wouldn’t use voting machines. Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in this year’s presidential elections.
Musk’s America PAC is inviting users to share “potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities” on an “Election Integrity Community” on X that has 13,000 members. There are posts on the feed that state that the voting machines are changing votes, as well as fake videos that claim the security of mail-in ballot is in doubt.
“What worries me most about this year is that we have a much more opaque window into the penetration of these lies, no matter where they come from,” Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar, who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, tells WIRED. Social media platforms have stopped such content, and as a result researcher access to data streams that allowed them to objectively report on the scale of these campaigns, has been cut off.
They would come up with a new conspiracy theory every six months. It would be debunked. They’d have an egg on their face. They go back in their hole for six months and then come back,” Adams said. “You only get so many bites at that apple.”
Election officials face an uphill battle to fight election lies: A pedagogical evaluation of the effect of fake elections on social media and Twitter
In the face of that landscape, election officials say they are controlling what they can control. They have spent lots of time reaching out to people who were skeptical of the election results and are now hoping that they can convince more people to accept the 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. A close election could result in violence after the fact because of that kind of imagery.
There is no shortage of examples, but the one that stands out most is X, as other platforms have also backed away from the more aggressive stances 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 allows users to opt out of some features of its fact-checking program, while its text-based social network has become more focused on news and politics.
“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. If someone wants to make something look weird, I believe they can do it.
Local election officials are making their process more transparent and welcoming record numbers of election monitors this year. But such openness is a double-edged sword: Video feeds provide more material for content creators who may use it to push their own narratives of malfeasance — such as the false claims against Georgia election workers amplified by Trump in 2020. That leaves officials operating with the knowledge that their every move will be scrutinized.
“If you see something seemingly suspicious, and then you take a picture of it and post it online, that can be decontextualized so quickly and not take into account all of the various remedies or the fact that there’s nothing suspicious there at all,” she said.
State and Local Election Officials are Sending Out More Demonstration to the Public, Embedded Social Media Campaign, and Informing the Public
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. She said that the checks that catch problems are ignored by the effort to identify real issues with voting.
When election officials try to correct Musk’s false claims, he has lashed out. The Secretary of State of Michigan told CBS News they received threats after Musk called her a liar for fact-checking his claim that the state has more eligible citizens.
Musk has become a key player for baseless claims that the election was stolen because Democrats brought in immigrants to vote for them.
A major communications platform is also controlled by one of the loudest voices who raised false rumors about the election. Musk, the world’s richest man, took control of Twitter two years ago and has remade the site, now called X, into a pro-Trump megaphone.
In Montgomery County, Neil Makhija built an ice cream truck that could be used to help people vote. Cramer co-authored a children’s book. Derek Bowens, in Durham County, N.C., created an app that could deliver accurate election information directly to people there.
The fight to reach voters on social media has felt like a losing battle for election officials over the years, says Carolina Lopez, a former election official.
“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 to CISA last month, urging them to help state and local governments identify election misinformation and to coordinate communications between the government, tech companies and researchers.
“It’s really important for us to get the message out there first and be as proactive as possible,” said Isaac Cramer, who runs elections in Charleston County, S.C.
Local election officials are trying to get more attention from media and the public in order to inform them of their processes. State election officials in a number of swing states have started holding multiple press conferences per week leading up to Nov. 5.
They are encouraged to know that the signal is coming from the state and local election official.
There is no sign of election or voting system breeches by foreign adversaries so far. But attackers don’t have to succeed in order to undermine confidence, Conley, the election security expert, said.
The FBI and DHS have announced that Americans should be aware of the possible tactics foreign actors might use to try and undermine the election.
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.
After the video first appeared on X, the federal government publicly attributes the fake Pennsylvania ballot video to Russia. And they warned they expect more such fakes in the coming days and weeks.
Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, told NPR that misinformation is cheap and effective.
Russia, Iran, and China are expected to use election fraud claims as a way to sow chaos and undermine democracy in America, as they are part of their larger goals.
In calling out foreign interference this year, law enforcement officials andfederal intelligence have taken a more aggressive approach. When Obama was in power, he did not make public information about the full extent of Russia’s support for the Trump campaign 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.
Perhaps the biggest factor is former President Donald Trump, who continues to falsely assert he won the 2020 election, despite courts and investigations finding no evidence of fraud. He will reject the results if he loses again this year.
Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies
The Anatomy of Tim Walz: How to Get Your Foot In The Water Before You Make a Video of a Pseudo-Reporter
The video was traced back to a Russian propaganda operation that has been trying to spread fake videos of Harris and Tim Walz.
The election influence campaigns are fighting an uphill battle, according to the co-director of a hub that tracks them. I’m sure that they feel like they’re trying to put their foot in the water before it explodes.
The incident shows that the deck is stacked against voting officials online in 2024, possibly even more so than this time in 2020. The phony video was viewed hundreds of thousands of times shortly after it was posted. A statement from Bucks County debunking it wasshared on X a few hours later.