Voting Officials Face an Uphill Battle to Fight Election Lyings: A New Conspiracy Theory Against Artificial Intelligence
“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. They stay in the hole for six months and then come back. “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.
He warned that the effect onvoters would be devastating if an election official used an artificial intelligence image of a ballot box to destroy it. In a close election, that kind of imagery could bring about violence, because Americans feel less confident in our system.
X, Meta, and Robustness: Why Trump and other social media executives have so much trouble about their online presence and influence about the election
X is the most obvious 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 their work. As of now, Meta gives users the option of opting out of its fact-checking program, while its text-based social network has prioritized news and politics.
A major communications platform is controlled by one of the loudest voices that is raising false rumors about the election. Two years ago Musk took control of the site and made it pro-Trump by changing its name to X.
“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. Unfortunately, if someone really wants to make something look weird, I think they can do it.
“Election officers around the country spend a whole lot of time producing content for social media, and it always kills me when I see, like, three likes and it’s usually themselves, their [spokesperson] and their mom,” said Lopez, who now runs the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions. “Election officials are trying to figure out, ‘Well, what else can I do to be heard?’”
“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.
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. When real issues are identified with voting, they tend to ignore checks in the system that catch problems.
When election officials try to correct Musk’s false claims, he lashes out. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CBS News that she and her staff received threats and harassing messages after Musk called her a liar when she fact-checked his claim that the state has more registered voters than eligible citizens.
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.
Keeping the Voter’s Window on Social Media: The Case of Neil Makhija, Andrew Bowens, and Isaac Cramer
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.
Increasingly election officials are thinking outside the box to reach voters, because trying to fight fire with fire on social media has felt like a losing battle for years now, says Carolina Lopez, a former election official from Miami-Dade County, Fla.
“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.
Last month, Warner wrote an open letter urging CISA to do more to help state and local governments identify and respond to election misinformation and disinformation campaigns, 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 media attention and educate the public on their processes. State election officials in a number of swing states are holding at least one press conference per week.
It is the local election official that signals through the noise, so we want them to make sure to do that.
The security of the vote casting and counting process is not going to be undermined by something like a distributed denial of service attack. “But our adversaries may try to convince the American people otherwise.”
The FBI and DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are teaming up to alert Americans to the possibility of foreign actors using cyberattacks and fake voter registration websites to 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.
The federal government moved quickly to publicly attribute the fake Pennsylvania ballot video to Russia the day after the video first appeared on X — a notably rapid turnaround for intelligence and law enforcement officials. And they warned they expect more such fakes in the coming days and weeks.
In an interview with NPR, Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said that misinformation is cheap and effective.
Russia, Iran and China will use election fraud claims to distract from their bigger goals of creating chaos and scuttling democracy.
Federal intelligence and law enforcement officials are taking a more aggressive approach this year in calling out foreign meddling. The Obama administration was unwilling to give information about the full extent of Russia’s efforts towards 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.
I will tell you what it’s possible if I lose. Because they cheat. That’s the only way we’re gonna lose, because they cheat,” Trump said at a September rally in Michigan.
Donald Trump continues to exaggerate his victory in the election despite courts and investigations finding no evidence of fraud. Should he lose again this year, he will reject the results.
Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies
A Russian Propaganda Operation Against Election Influence: A Case Study of a Fake Video Targeting Harris and Tim Walz
In the past week, there have been faked videos targeting Harris and her running mate Tim Walz that have been traced back to a Russian propaganda operation.
“They’re fighting an uphill battle,” said Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which tracks election influence campaigns. “I’m sure that they often feel like they’re trying to put their finger in the dike before it bursts.”
But the incident showed what has been clear for some time now: Online in 2024, the deck is stacked against voting officials, maybe even more so than in 2020. The phony video was viewed hundreds of thousands of times shortly after it was posted. A statement from Bucks County debunking it three hours later was shared on X fewer than 100 times.
A video began circulating last week on the social media site X that purported to show a person in Pennsylvania ripping up votes marked for Donald Trump and Mark Harris, the presumed Democratic nominee.
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A number of ads on Facebook appear to promote Harris, but they are actually spreading misinformation about her current policy positions. These ads, which have been viewed millions of times in swing states, are posted by an account called Progress 2028, suggesting a liberal counterpart to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The ads claim that Harris intends to implement a mandatory gun buyback program, provide Medicare benefits and driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants and ban fracking. Funding for these ads comes from a dark money group backed by Musk and others, according to the campaign tracking site Open Secrets.
Nearly 40% of women under the age of 30 cite abortion as a top issue in this election. In 10 states, abortion access will be up for vote next week. VP Harris believes that she will restore reproductive freedom and sign a bill codifying the right to abortion if elected. Donald Trump and his allies have been talking about the possibility of implementing national abortion limits, also known as a minimum national standard. Trump said on the campaign trail he would veto a federal abortion ban.
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