By Tiffany Hsu
Tate Fall is overwhelmed.
When she signed on to be director of elections in Cobb County, Georgia, last year, she knew she’d be registering voters and recruiting poll workers, maybe fixing up voting machines.
She didn’t expect the unending flood of disinformation — or at least, she wasn’t prepared for how much it would overtake her job. She has had election deniers shout at her at public meetings, fielded weekend calls from politicians panicked about a newly circulating falsehood, and even reviewed conspiracy theories circulating on Nextdoor forums that might worsen skepticism among distrustful constituents already doubtful that the democratic system is reliable and secure.
And that was before the election went sideways.
In the weeks since former President Donald Trump was targeted in an assassination attempt and Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, adding Tim Walz to the ticket, conspiracy theories have surged. The claims were pushed by pundits and politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican known for promoting far-right conspiracy theories, who represents part of Fall’s jurisdiction.
The implications for Fall’s workload will not be good, she said, noting that conspiracy theories can make it harder to reach constituents who already find elections to be mystifying, like “magical” events.
“Anytime there’s a big event, that’s an opportunity for bad actors to seize on that and act on it,” said Fall, 30. “It’s our job to make sure we’re answering those questions effectively and communicating to our voters.”
Increasingly, her generation of elections officials must multitask as defenders against disinformation and its consequences. On any given day, they are debunking claims that masses of dead people are contaminating the voting pool or that mail-in balloting is susceptible to fraud. In just the past year, they have been flooded with inane demands for details about their employees, faced harassment campaigns targeted at their female family members, received intimidating letters laced with fentanyl and been subjected to fake threats of bombings and break-ins.
The stress has pushed many public servants to resign or retire. In Wisconsin alone, the state association of county clerks found that 31 of its 72 members had never administered a presidential election, with most entering office after their predecessors left mid-term. The remaining officials, many of them overwhelmed and very tired, are once again marshaling their limited resources to try to reach people unmoved by earlier efforts to debunk and limit persistent online and offline rumors.
“Their job description has expanded significantly — it’s not just about getting voting equipment out once every couple of years. It’s a much longer and sustained process of getting trusted information out to the public,” said Jonathan Miller, the chief program officer at the Public Rights Project, a civil rights nonprofit. The group announced a project this year to help elections officials cope with increased litigation, especially in battleground states.
In Michigan, another swing state, Ottawa County residents “had a really difficult time” grappling with false narratives after the 2020 election, said Justin F. Roebuck, the county clerk. A Republican in a mostly Republican jurisdiction, he plunged into what his wife described as an existential crisis trying to understand what went wrong.
“Emotionally, I think, we’ve all gone through the wringer,” he said. “The vehicle for sowing fear and doubt about the system itself has changed — it’s just this perpetual moving target.”
Roebuck has spent 17 years in election administration, but this year “definitely feels different,” he said. He has tried to conduct his own research — he twice took notes while watching “2,000 Mules,” a film built on unfounded allegations about election fraud, to analyze its misstatements. He shifted away from “throwing data and facts at people,” realizing that rigorous research from established think tanks may not move constituents who trust only right-wing outlets.
Now, he tries to reach voters on a personal level, stressing that he and his family are part of their community and care just as deeply for it.
“There’s a lot of people out there who are not bad actors, who are just really concerned because they’ve heard from sources they trust that there’s a problem,” he said.
The disconnect also exists in places like Oregon. The Democratic secretary of state, LaVonne Griffin-Valade, faced a steep cut to her annual budget for anti-disinformation measures, to $150,000 this year from $500,000 in 2022. That has forced her team to reuse old public service announcements and reduce their advertising spending 35% compared with the midterms. Every day, her office fields hundreds of (often antagonistic) messages about the voting system, according to Ben Morris, her chief of staff.
When his team was building its playbook against conspiracy theories, academic research on disinformation was “incredibly important” as a resource, Morris said. In recent months, however, work on the subject by American universities and think tanks has been chilled by a right-wing campaign that cast it as a shadowy plot to stifle speech.
Morris’ team also hired an artificial intelligence company, Logically, to help monitor the spread of false claims via a service that he compared to “a Google alert on steroids.” In the fall, local Republicans said the team’s contract infringed on voters’ free speech. (Republicans in Washington state said that a similar contract with the secretary of state amounted to “political surveillance” and “government censorship.”)
Morris pushed back, saying that his team used Logically’s service to keep track of false narratives and identify which ones to debunk for constituents. The secretary of state’s office cannot take down online content and stopped submitting removal requests to social media companies after 2022 because “we didn’t think it was a good use of our time — Facebook and Twitter and those companies just ignored us,” he said.
Resistance from state legislators has tied up funding in various states that would have protected elections administrators and supported their efforts against conspiracy theories and false claims, officials said.
“Have those sorts of folks hampered what we’ve done? A little bit, yeah,” said Adrian Fontes, the secretary of state in Arizona and a Democrat. “We’re not doing anywhere near the kind of work that we could be doing because we understand the politics of the budgeting process, and there are some asks that we just refrained from making.”
Elections officials are doing what they can this year to shore up voter trust, setting up fact-checking websites (like in Pennsylvania) and posting refutations on social media (like a Mythbuster Mondays series in North Carolina).
Many officials are girding for a potential October surprise powered by AI — a piece of deepfaked audio or visual content, perhaps impersonating a candidate or poll worker, that cannot be debunked in time. The technology could also supercharge harassment campaigns, making it easier to blitz districts with frivolous public records requests asking for an overly broad range of documents, such as voter history files over an unspecified time frame, officials said. Last week, a bipartisan group of secretaries of state wrote to tech billionaire Elon Musk to urge him to fix his AI-powered search assistant, Grok chatbot, saying it provided inaccurate information about ballot deadlines and then failed to correct the mistake for 10 days.
In Arizona, Fontes ran a crisis scenario exercise involving simulations of AI-enabled attacks, including deepfakes of election officials and attempts to harvest official login credentials. Several Republican election deniers in his state won their primary challenges late last month.
“I don’t have time to fret,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to inoculate the system, to prepare it for our voters, for what we think might come. And I hope I’m overreacting.”
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