This excerpt is from an analysis by Matt Vasilogambros of Stateline.org that first appeared in Techwire's sister publication, Governing.
Election officials must work to combat the spread of disinformation ahead of the 2020 elections. Some are working to combat individual incorrect tweets, while others are turning to statewide emails or YouTube ads.
Jim Irizarry has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of false and misleading information about voting access coursing through social media lately. The assistant county clerk for San Mateo County and his team have been training for this moment for years, since the sophisticated Russian disinformation machine emerged during the last presidential election.
“They don’t have to change a vote in the voting machines,” Irizarry said. “But if you can get into the minds of voters to undermine their confidence in casting that ballot, you’ve been successful.”
This year, state and local election officials across the country expect they’ll need to defend voters against potentially devastating and widespread disinformation attacks that could suppress turnout and sow doubt in November’s results.
Bad actors, from foreign nations to local gadflies, have countless opportunities to spread falsehoods and misleading information. In recent elections, voters have fallen victim to scams claiming people can vote by text message or claiming their polling place closed. Lies on social media can go viral hours before an election, becoming nearly impossible to eliminate. This year, the pandemic has exposed more potential for disinformation, as states and counties scramble to figure out how to conduct elections through expanded mail-in voting and fewer polling places.
This can be challenging, however. The United States has no national election system. There are 10,000 systems run by underfunded and thinly stretched counties and cities. Elections are decentralized, and so too is the response to disinformation.
The closer it gets to the presidential election, the louder the megaphone of misleading voices will get.
Aggressively responding to misleading and false election information has become an essential part of Sam Mahood’s daily job as press secretary for California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat.
But Mahood’s response is not limited to one political party over another. A month before California’s presidential primary, Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and co-host of “Pod Save America,” shared a tweet from his colleague at Crooked Media that falsely said the state was purging 5 million voters from its rolls. It caught Mahood’s attention, and he quickly went to Twitter.
“Neither of these things are true,” Mahood wrote to the tweet’s author. “Please delete this tweet, it’s just spreading misinformation.” The tweet was taken down. Crooked Media, he said, apologized.
But local officials must weigh their responses; some claims might not be worth elevating through an official response, Mahood said; nor should he spend his day chasing social media interactions. Additionally, there is always a challenge with protecting political speech when responding to information that might be misleading or incorrect, he said.
“It’s very hard,” he said. “But you have to weigh where something is gaining traction and using the methods that are available to you.”
Over the past two years, Padilla’s office sent emails to every voter for whom it had addresses with information about reporting misinformation to the state. The department also has a prominent link on its website directing misinformation claims to a frequently checked email account.
©2020 Stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
