Election officials are confronting a wave of threats and security challenges coming from a troubling source: inside the election system itself. In interviews on the sidelines of the National Association of Secretaries of State’s summer conference, a dozen chief election administrators detailed a growing number of “insider threats” leading to attempted or successful election security breaches aided by local officials. The most prominent was in Colorado, where a county clerk was indicted for her role in facilitating unauthorized access to voting machines. But there have been similar instances elsewhere, including in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Beyond security breaches, other insider efforts to undermine elections have sprouted. In New Mexico last month, the board of commissioners in Otero County — a predominantly Republican county along the state’s southern border with Texas — refused to certify primary election results, citing unfounded claims about the security of voting machines that are rooted in conspiracy theories about hacked election equipment from the 2020 election. “What’s clear is this is a nationally coordinated effort,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. “It’s multi-year, multi-faceted … not just pressuring election officials, but pressuring local elected officials as well.” Election officials fear the handful of publicly disclosed incidents over the last two years are only the start of a wave ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections.
National: Research suggests one way to fight voting misinformation | Miles Parks/NPR
For election officials, falsehoods about America’s voting process can feel like a game of whack-a-mole. “There’s just so much that is incorrect that they just keep repeating and repeating and repeating,” one Colorado voting official told NPR recently. “And then as soon as I have absolutely blocked off that path with actual correct information, then they just move that goal post. And they keep just moving the goal posts.” But it’s clear this “game” has massive stakes. A Justice Department official said in a Senate hearing this week that the federal law enforcement agency had reviewed more than a thousand hostile threats against election workers over the past year. And in a separate congressional hearing, lawmakers mulled how to make the presidential election certification process less vulnerable to partisan hijacking. In what has essentially become an information war for the future of democracy, people driven by misinformation are acting on it to harass election workers and subvert the will of the voters. And election officials have struggled to find an effective message to fight back.
Full Article: Research suggests one way to fight voting misinformation : NPR