Election Days are rife with misinformation. Here’s what to watch for.

Election Days are rife with misinformation. Here’s what to watch out for.

The midterms are here, and misinformation researchers say they are bracing for the deluge of false and misleading online posts that has become typical of Election Day in the United States.

While the 2018 midterms were plagued by fears of new foreign disinformation campaigns disrupting the vote, experts this time are more fearful of unwitting participants and bad actors alike pushing familiar and homegrown falsehoods to stoke confusion. 

The upshot: Voters may already have a baseline understanding of what misleading claims could fuel uncertainty online about the process — and how to avoid them. (For more tips on dodging misinformation more broadly, check out this guide by my colleague Heather Kelly.)

Here’s a look at what misinformation you should be on the lookout for throughout this Election Day, according to researchers: 

University of Washington researcher Mike Caulfield told me that much of the misleading information they expect to proliferate on Election Day will be based on real voting experiences — but that could be miscontextualized or weaponized to raise unfounded concerns.

Caulfield said some of the earliest instances could stem from confusion about the presence of poll observers at voting locations who Republican officials and supporters of the baseless “Stop the Steal” movement have sought to recruit ahead of the midterms to track possible fraud.

“As people come to observe, we expect some conflict around that because I think there’s inevitably going to be some misunderstandings around what those observers are able to do and what they aren’t,” said Caulfield, who recently released a widely cited guide on election misinformation with other researchers through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). 

As during the 2020 election, Caulfield said, misunderstandings or disputes about what degree of access those observers have at polling sites could spark conspiracy theories that individuals were blocked from performing oversight in a bid to cover up supposed fraud. 

Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington, told reporters during a briefing Friday that for many voters, “the pump is already primed” to view any purportedly suspicious activity as potential evidence of fraud, exacerbating the issue. 

“The folks that first carry [these claims], they don’t even have to tell their audiences … ‘Oh, this is about voter fraud.’ They just put up, ‘Oh, this is suspicious,’ and then everyone already interprets it,” she said, citing ongoing but unfounded suspicions about the 2020 tally. 

Researchers said they also expect to see claims of “electioneering” or of “collusion” by poll workers — the idea that election officials or volunteers are actively trying to shape the vote.

“A really important thing with all of this is to realize, in most cases, it’s just a misunderstanding … and then they take that confusion on the web, and other people leverage it,” Caulfield said. 

As with all claims of electoral misconduct, while some of the original incidents may occur early on, allegations are likely to keep trickling out well beyond Election Day as more videos, images and accounts arise, Caulfield said.

In addition to misunderstandings from human interactions, technical errors with voting equipment historically also have served as key drivers of false election narratives online — and are poised to do so again, according to experts. 

“Reports about ballots, voting machines, or voting paraphernalia being rigged in such a way to confuse, alter, or discard one’s vote” are all rumors that could swirl throughout the day and beyond, Caulfield and other researchers wrote in the EIP  report. 

Caulfield said that while technical errors inevitably happen, creating “a real error underneath” misconduct claims, “it’s not necessarily something that has been engineered for partisan gain.”

On election night and beyond

As polling stations nationwide begin to close and results start to trickle in, much of the misinformation shifts to focusing on the counting of votes, Caulfield said. 

That leads to users at times sharing bogus or misleading statistical analyses claiming that certain batches of voting results are “statistically impossible” or “statistically fishy,” he said. 

“You also get claims about improper counting procedures … improper ballot canvassing procedures, and so forth, and so you start to get these counting claims,” Caulfield said.

Researchers noted that in the past users have raised unsubstantiated complaints about purported late-arriving ballots and suggested foul play to call for them to be invalidated.

The fact that ballots are expected to continue to be counted in a number of key states beyond election night could also stoke suspicions, despite the delays being widely anticipated. 

“You have an extended period of uncertainty as we count the ballots and the fact that some races that historically maybe haven’t been as close are going to be a little closer this year could just create conditions where more rumors might spread,” Starbird said.

Election Day 2022 is set to pose another major misinformation test, but with a slew of Republican officials  denying the 2020 election results or refusing to say whether they will accept the midterm election results, expect those challenges to extend well beyond Tuesday. 

Musk encourages Twitter users to vote for Republicans

Elon Musk’s Monday tweet encouraging “independent-minded voters” to vote Republican marked a significant departure for leaders of social media firms, who tend to avoid partisan political advocacy, Will Oremus, Jennifer Hassan and Faiz Siddiqui report. Musk has expressed disdain about the Democratic Party’s direction in recent years, with the Twitter owner writing in April that he supported Barack Obama but that the party had been “hijacked by extremists.” In May, he wrote that he voted for Hillary Clinton and President Biden; however, he wrote that “given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican.”

Musk’s pronouncement came less than two weeks after his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter closed. “Musk’s endorsement of GOP candidates to his 115 million Twitter followers, a day before midterm elections, is likely to intensify the partisan divide over his takeover of the platform,” my colleagues write. “Lawmakers in the past have grilled executives of social media companies including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube as to whether their decisions could have influenced election outcomes, even as those executives have studiously avoided signaling their preferences for a given party or candidate.”

Election officials brace for more online threats

Election workers at all levels have faced a tide of threats that experts say are a direct result of false claims about the 2020 election that were partly spread on social media, Cat Zakrzewski reports. Now, election workers and law enforcement officials are bracing for another way of threats on Election Day and afterward, when new election fraud claims are expected to lead to more violent online rhetoric.

Most states and counties don’t have staff dedicated to monitoring threats. The Arizona Secretary of State Office will rely on interns to keep an eye on what’s going on online. They’ll be focusing on questions about voting, however. “We don’t have a security staff that’s monitoring all of the comments,” said Allie Bones, assistant secretary of state of Arizona. “It’s quite traumatizing to have to go through all of that and see what people are saying about you, your office or your boss.”

Offshore firm with links to U.S. agencies wields powerful internet role

Major tech companies and internet browsers have given TrustCor Systems root certificate authority, a powerful place in global internet infrastructure that guarantees that websites are safe, Joseph Menn reports. But the company has connections to contractors of U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement, he reports.

“The company’s Panamanian registration records show it has the identical slate of officers, agents and partners as a spyware maker identified earlier this year as an affiliate of Arizona-based Packet Forensics LLC, which public contracting records and company documents show has sold communication interception services to U.S. government agencies for more than a decade,” Menn writes.

The company also offers an email service that claims to be end-to-end encrypted, though some experts say they found evidence that undermines that claim. And a person familiar with Packet Forensics’s work said it used TrustCor’s certificate process and email service, MsgSafe, to help the U.S. government catch suspected terrorists and intercept communications.

Packet Forensics counsel Kathryn Temel said the firm doesn’t have a business relationship with TrustCor, though Temel declined to say if it previously had one. TrustCor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Twitter users are trying to migrate to Mastodon. Our colleague, Michelle Ye Hee Lee:

Olivier Knox, who writes The Daily 202:

Twitter engineer files retaliation complaint over job cuts (Bloomberg News)

Tanaiste ‘confident’ tech firms will comply with statutory redundancy rules (Evening Standard)

U.S. Supreme Court leans toward making challenges to FTC and SEC easier (Reuters)

The New York Times is finally making changes to Wordle (Jonathan Lee)

• Michael O’Brien has joined BSA | The Software Alliance as its vice president of global public affairs. O’Brien was previously the vice president of public affairs and advocacy for the National Association of Manufacturers.

• Werner Stengg, a cabinet expert for European Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, speaks at an Atlantic Council event on Europe’s push for “digital sovereignty” on Wednesday at 11 a.m.
• Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the newly elected secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, and National Archives and Records Administration innovation chief Pamela Wright speak at an American University event on Friday at 8:30 a.m.

That’s all for today — thank you so much for joining us! Make sure to tell others to subscribe to The Technology 202 here. Get in touch with tips, feedback or greetings on Twitter or email.