On Friday afternoon, with a few days left in the presidential race, federal agencies that help protect American elections issued a warning to voters in a video that has gone viral on the Internet. It appeared to show illegal immigrants voting in Georgia, and US intelligence officials concluded it was the latest in a series of hoaxes produced by “Russian influence actors.”
“This Russian operation is part of a broader effort by Moscow to raise baseless questions about the integrity of US elections and is fueling division among the American people,” read a statement from the FBI and two other government agencies, which warned that Russia will continue to create and disseminate these. fake even in the weeks and months after the election.
To anyone who lived through the last two presidential elections, this statement seemed familiar. It’s been eight years since the 2016 US election was tainted by disinformation attributed to Moscow, and the government has yet to find a way to stop this kind of meddling. Instead, the problem has become more complicated.
China and Iran are now using similar tactics to try to influence American voters, while the number of these Kremlin-linked operations has increased in the past eight years from two to more than 70, said Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. , which tracks and often exposes the activities of external influence. “Now they have thousands of people working in this area,” he said of the Russians.
A long list of government agencies work to combat these threats, from the FBI to more obscure positions like USPIS, which deals with mail crime. When I reached out to 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.
Charged with protecting everything from the power grid to the banking system from malicious cyber attacks, CISA also often takes the lead in securing US elections. Its short history speaks volumes for the complexity of its work. Organized in response to the 2016 Russian influence operation, the organization’s first director, Christopher Krebs, was fired by then-President Trump for publicly defending the integrity of the election that Trump lost in 2020. (Krebs learned of his firing via a presidential tweet. )
House Republicans have since tried to cut the CISA budget but failed. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has accused the agency of trying to stifle political speech, and there is growing concern among Democrats that Trump will ignore the agency if he wins the presidential race.
This controversy has put CISA in a difficult position. Along with its job of protecting the election infrastructure, it has been forced to deal with a “firehose of disinformation” aimed at the American public, said Cait Conley, a senior adviser at CISA who works on election security. He says, the organization’s answer is to “fill this place with accurate information.”
CISA Director, Jen Easterly, has gone on a media tour assuring voters that they can trust the results of the polls. Last year the organization also launched a podcast called CISA Live, whose monthly episodes offer the same message as well as discussions of China’s cyber threats and advice on what tech items to buy as holiday gifts. On YouTube, they rarely get more than a thousand views, much less the nearly 3000 people who work at CISA.
Now think about what they are going through. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, more than twenty of the most popular podcasts in the country have raised claims that the upcoming election will be held. The main source of that message has been Trump, who has never backed down from his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His current running mate is Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform where much of our political discourse plays out.
“Many times we try to blame some of that mistrust on foreign actors, but the truth is that certain narratives have grown more at home,” said Olga Belogolova, a disinformation expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “There may be increased threat actors from other countries, Russian, Chinese, Iranian,” he said. “But those stories are being spread by American officials and candidates.”
Since 2016, Americans have become more accepting of them. Another survey conducted last year by Monmouth University found that two-thirds of Republicans believe that voter fraud determined the outcome of the 2020 vote. Another survey, released this month by NPR, PBS News and Marist, found that most Americans are worried. voter fraud in the current vote, including 86% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats.
After the 2016 presidential election, Belogolova worked on the Trust and Safety team at Facebook, trying to identify and disrupt Russian disinformation agents on the platform. He describes it as a game of Whack-a-mole, with new accounts appearing to replace those that have been deleted. The work proved useful but also frustrating, he says, because his team took down the fakes without offering anything in their place. “You have to find ways to tell stories that are compelling to people, so they have something to believe in,” he said. “I think that’s the job right now.”
In trying to meet that challenge, CISA has tried to increase reliable sources of information. In mid-October, a fake video surfaced online, showing the destruction of what appeared to be Trump’s email ballots. Federal election officials took only a few hours to prepare the video, and the FBI accused Russian actors of producing it. A few days later, with only a week to go before election day, CISA launched a “one-stop shop” website to expose fake videos and other forms of disrespect.
Watts, a threat analyst at Microsoft, says such a quick response helps reduce the spread of these clips online, as news outlets can quickly identify them as fake. But they can still garner millions of views on social media, because most Americans are willing to share it. Although government agencies have made significant progress in responding to election interference since 2016, the American public has become increasingly suspicious of the conduct of elections.
That challenge to the democratic process can be very difficult to handle. As Watts puts it: “It’s all about restoring trust over time.”
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