Voting officials are facing an uphill battle to fight election lies
Voting officials face an uphill battle to fight election lies: “I’ve seen it before, but haven’t seen it”
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 go back in their hole for six months and then come back,” Adams said. You only get a limited amount of bites at that apple.
election officials say they are in charge in the face of that landscape. They have been working around the clock in reaching out to skeptical voters, and now they are still hopeful that they will make a difference.
He said that using an artificial intelligence image of an election official breaking into a drop box would have a devastating effect. That imagery could cause violence if it was used in a close election, which could undermine Americans’ confidence in our system.
Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies
A Social Media Dispatch on Election Deception: The Case against Musk and the Establishment of Immigrant Importance of Political Correctness
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.
The very subject of election “disinformation” itself has been turned into a partisan fight. Government agencies, online platforms, and researchers have been undermined and one institution out of the field by a coordinated Republican legal and political campaign to depict efforts to mitigate or track the spread of false information online ascensorship.
“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 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. The election officials are trying to figure out what they can 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.
Evidence generation infrastructure is a bit more robust this year, according to Danielle Lee Tomson, a research manager at the University of Washington. When these efforts find issues with voting they tend to forget about the checks in the system that catch problems.
When election officials try to correct Musk’s false claims, he has lashed 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 is a major component in the baseless claims that Democrats are bringing in immigrants to illegally vote for them, which are being used by Trump and other Republicans to lay the groundwork for a claim that the election was stolen should he lose.
Makhija, Cramer, and Lopez: The State and Local Governments are Stealth in Keeping the American Voter Safe
In Montgomery County, Neil Makhija built a voting ice cream truck and traveled to other parts of the county to help people vote. Cramer, in Charleston County, co-wrote a children’s book. An app was created by a North Carolina man to deliver accurate election information to the 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.
When it comes to elections in Charleston County, S.C., being as proactive as possible is important.
Local election officials are making more of a effort to seek out media attention in order to educate the public on 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.
Officials say, so far, there’s no sign that foreign adversaries have breached any election or voting systems. 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.
Russian operatives used to spoof American news outlets, the government indicted employees of a Kremlin-backed TV station, and charges were filed against Iranian hackers for their part in targeting the Trump campaign.
It took just a day for the federal government to publicly attribute the fake Pennsylvania ballot video to Russia. They warned they will get more fakes in the near future.
In an NPR interview, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said that misinformation is cheap and effective.
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 all use Artificial Intelligence to make more misleading content.
Law enforcement officials and federal intelligence are more aggressive with their calls out for foreign interference. 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. At a September rally in Michigan, Trump said that they will lose if they cheat.
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. Should he lose again this year, he will reject the results.
Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies
The 2024 epoch of voter fraud: Darren Linvill, a Clemson University senior editor of the media forensics hub
Linvill traced the video back to a Russian propaganda operation that has used faked videos against Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
“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.
Last week, a video began circulating on X, which purports to show someone in Pennsylvania ripping up votes for Donald Trump and not Mark Harris, the Democratic nominee.
Kahn Talks with Carrie: Detecting Breast Cancer Screening, Prevention, and Access to Abortion: Deriving Preventive Measures from the Amazon’s Watershed
The biggest river in the world is facing significant challenges. It’s seen its lowest water levels in over 100 years due to a prolonged drought. This situation affects not only the river itself but also the wildlife and the people who rely on its water. NPR’s Carrie Kahn visited one of the Amazon’s most impacted regions and spoke with local residents who are experiencing the effects of the drought firsthand.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month is an annual health campaign that promotes the screening and prevention of breast cancer. It is a great time to learn how often you should be checked for this disease. Over the past three decades breast cancer deaths have decreased by 40% thanks to improved screening and treatment options. Here are some things that you should know about detection and screening.
A series of Facebook ads seemingly advocating for Harris are actually spreading misinformation about her current policy positions in an attempt to mislead voters. These ads, which have been viewed millions of times in swing states, are posted by an account called “Progress 2028,” which suggests 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. The dark money group backing these ads is led by Musk and others, according to Open Secrets.
42% of women under the age of 30 cite abortion as a top issue. Abortion access will be directly on the ballot in 10 states next week. Vice President Harris has stated that if she is elected, she would sign a bill that guaranteed the right to an abortion. Donald Trump and his allies discussed the possibility of national abortion limits, which would be a minimum national standard. Trump rolled that back on the campaign trail a couple of weeks ago, saying he would veto a federal abortion ban.
Up First: The Up First Newsletter for All the News You Need to Kick Start Your Day (The Up First Podcast is Reloaded) — A Short Review
Good morning. You’re reading the Up First newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to the Up First podcast for all the news you need to start your day.
