Election integrity is becoming increasingly difficult to defend

Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in front of an exhibit titled “Impersonated US Media Sites Maintained by Russian Influence Actors” during a hearing in Washington, DC on September 18, 2024 Credit – Kent Nishimura – Bloomberg/ Getty Images

OOn Friday afternoon, with just days left in the presidential race, federal agencies that help protect U.S. elections warned voters about a video circulating online. It appeared that immigrants were voting illegally in Georgia, and US intelligence officials had concluded that this was the latest in a series of forgeries produced by “Russian influence actors.”

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and to stoke division among Americans,” the report said. the statement from the FBI and two other federal agencies, which warned that Russia would continue to create and spread these counterfeits, even in the weeks and months after the election.

To anyone who has lived through the last two presidential elections, the statement may seem familiar. Eight years have passed since the 2016 US election was tainted by disinformation attributed to Moscow, and the administration has found no way to discourage this type of interference. Instead, the problem has become messier.

China and Iran are now using the same tactics in their attempts to influence American voters, while the number of these Kremlin-linked operations has multiplied from two to more than 70 in the past eight years, says Clint Watts, head of Threat Analysis Microsoft Center. , which monitors and often exposes foreign influence operations. “There are thousands of people working in this room now,” he says of the Russians.

A long list of government agencies are working to counter these threats, ranging from the FBI to more obscure bureaucracies like the USPIS, which deals with mail-in crime. When I approached three of them to talk about election interference, they all pointed me to an agency within the Department of Homeland Security known as CISA – the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which co-authored Friday’s statement with the FBI .

CISA is charged with securing everything from the electrical grid to the banking system against malicious cyber attacks, and often takes the lead in protecting U.S. elections as well. The short history says a lot about the difficulty of his mission. Organized in response to the 2016 Russian influence operation, the agency’s first director, Christopher Krebs, was fired by then-President Trump for publicly defending the integrity of the 2020 election that Trump lost. (Krebs learned of his firing via a presidential tweet.)

Republicans in the House of Representatives have since tried unsuccessfully to cut CISA’s budget. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has done just that the agency accused of trying to censor political speech, and it is growing concern among Democrats that Trump would undermine the agency if he wins the presidential race.

The controversy has put CISA in a difficult position. In addition to its mission to secure election infrastructure, the country has been forced to deal with a “firehose of disinformation” aimed at the American public, said Cait Conley, a senior adviser at CISA who focuses on election security. The agency’s response, she says, “is to flood the zone with accurate information.”

CISA director Jen Easterly has gone on a media tour to reassure voters that the outcome of the vote can be trusted. Last year the agency also launched a podcast called CISA Livewhose monthly episodes offer the same message, alongside discussions on Chinese cyber threats and advice on which gadgets to buy as holiday gifts. On YouTube they rarely get more than a thousand views, much less than the roughly 3,000 people who work at CISA.

Now think about what they’re dealing with. According to one analysis by the Washington PostMore than two dozen of the country’s most popular podcasts have amplified claims that the upcoming election will be rigged. The main source of that message has been Trump, who has never backed down from his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His ally in the current race is Elon Musk, the owner of a social network where much of our political discourse takes place.

“Often we try to attribute some of that distrust to foreign threat actors, but the reality is that a given narrative is largely homegrown,” said Olga Belogolova, a disinformation expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It can be amplified by foreign threat actors, Russian, Chinese, Iranian,” she says. “But these stories are being spread by American officials and candidates.”

Since 2016, Americans have become more receptive to them. A survey conducted last year by Monmouth University found that two in three Republicans believe voter fraud determined the outcome of the 2020 election. released this month from NPR, PBS News and Marist found that a majority of Americans are concerned about voter fraud in the current vote, including 86% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats.

After the 2016 presidential election, Belogolova worked on Facebook’s Trust and Safety team, attempting to identify and disrupt Russian disinformation agents on the platform. She describes it as a game of Whack-a-mole, where new accounts appear to replace deleted ones. The work seemed useful but also frustrating, she says, as her team removed counterfeits without offering anything in return. “You have to find ways to tell stories that appeal to people, so that they have something to believe in,” she says. “I think that’s the job now.”

In an effort to address this challenge, CISA has sought to expand reliable information sources. In mid-October, it responded to a fake video that appeared online showing the destruction of what appeared to be mail-in ballots for Trump. It took election officials just a few hours to debunk the video, and the FBI blamed Russian actors for producing it. A few days later, with just a week to go until Election Day, CISA launched a “one-stop shop” website to expose fake videos and other forms of disinformation.

Watts, the threat analyst at Microsoft, says such quick responses help slow the spread of these clips online because news media can quickly identify them as fake. But they can still generate millions of views on social media because many Americans are willing to share them. While government agencies have become more effective in responding to election interference since 2016, the American public has become more suspicious of the conduct of elections.

That challenge to the democratic process could prove much more difficult to handle. As Watts puts it, “That’s all about rebuilding trust over time.”

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