Nothing is certain in life except death, taxes and — this Election Day, at least — the spread of mis- and disinformation.
In recent weeks, U.S. voters have encountered a seemingly unending deluge of hoaxes, half-truths and out-and-out lies, many of them fabricated by U.S. adversaries and then amplified on engagement-hungry social media platforms such as X.
If recent presidential contests offer any hint, the fire hose of falsehood is likely to intensify on and after Tuesday, as a razor-tight election provides fertile soil for often unfounded rumors to ricochet around the internet. And spies, hackers and influence peddlers linked to China, Iran and Russia could unleash a new wave of disinformation and manipulation tactics, seeing it as their last chance to sway the U.S. electorate to their preferred candidate — or simply corrode Americans’ faith in their democracy.
Complicating it all, of course, is a worry far closer to home: that former President Donald Trump will follow the same playbook he used in 2020, declaring victory before the outcome is clear and discrediting the results if he loses. Unlike four years ago, he’ll also have MAGA mega-donor Elon Musk to help amplify his claims to potentially hundreds of millions of voters on X.
“We are in an election cycle with an unprecedented amount of disinformation, including disinformation being aggressively peddled and amplified by our foreign adversaries at a greater scale than ever before,” CISA Director Jen Easterly, who was speaking broadly about election threats, told reporters on Monday.
Here is POLITICO’s guide to help you, the voter, weather the coming storm of disinformation.
Elections aren’t easy to hack
State-backed cyber sleuths, cybercriminals and hacktivists have all claimed to “hack” various parts of the U.S. election system over the years. The good news is that their bark is much bigger than their bite.
The machines that are used to cast and tabulate votes on Election Day are not connected to the internet, and almost all produce some type of paper backup. That means three things: It is hard to hack voting machines, more difficult still to flip enough votes to steal an election, and nearly impossible to pull it all off without getting caught.
State-backed foreign hackers targeting the election, the U.S. intelligence community has said, have therefore settled on a different strategy: exaggerating the impact of relatively minor attacks to shake Americans’ confidence in their democracy.
Overloading county websites with junk traffic or leaking non-public voter registration data can cause headaches for election officials. But it’s not going to rattle the foundations of U.S. democracy.
“It would not be possible for a bad actor to tamper with or manipulate our voting system in such a way that it would have a material effect on the outcome of the presidential election, certainly not without being detected,” Easterly said in the call with reporters Monday.
Minor errors are common. Conspiracies aren’t.
Polls may open late. The computers used to check in voters can stall. And officials in some precincts may be slow to report the count.
The explanations are rarely the stuff of Netflix spy thrillers.
Election officials are people — and people make mistakes, said Ben Hovland, a commissioner at the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency that helps with election administration issues.
Poll workers somewhere may misplace their keys or plug something in wrong. Sometimes, a county can temporarily lose power or internet access through no fault of its own.
“Running an election with nearly a million poll workers is an undertaking like nothing else,” said Hovland. “Within that there are errors, there are things that pop up.”
While that might seem obvious, minor Election Day hiccups like that often become fodder for conspiracy theories, whipping the internet into a rage-filled frenzy.
Hovland’s advice? Take a pause before you believe (and spread) salacious news on election day. “It may not be nefarious. It may just be part of the challenge of conducting an enormous election all across the country,” he said.
Be patient with the results
Water is wet, grass is green, and election night results are — we repeat — unofficial.
OK, try as we might, it’s unfair to expect America (or the media) to end their election night infatuation with Steve Kornacki. But one of the best antidotes to election hoaxes is still a little dose of patience.
Democrats and Republicans have different preferences about how and when to vote, and key jurisdictions across the country have their own rules about how late they can receive and begin processing vote-by-mail, absentee, overseas and provisional ballots. Election night returns can therefore offer a misleading sample of the full vote — like when the count of mail-in votes, which historically lean Democratic, helped erase Trump’s early lead in several states in 2020.
Also be wary of those who say a slow count itself betrays a problem: Unlike in other countries, the ballots in each U.S. presidential election include dozens of other races, making it far more tedious to tabulate the results.
“Accurately counting millions of ballots takes time and it is important to be patient,” the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors said in a statement Monday.
The statement also reminded Americans that close races could require a recount or be audited to double-check the results. “We implore all Americans to understand these processes are normal and done in accordance with state and territorial law,” the statement continued.
Distrust and verify
Haitian immigrants did not vote multiple times for Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia, and poll workers in Pennsylvania did not destroy ballots for Trump, though a pair of videos that went viral in the last 10 days would have you think otherwise.
Both were fabrications of Kremlin influence actors, the U.S. intelligence community has said, and late Monday, it released a new statement calling out “additional influence operations” from Russia.
More could be on the way soon.
America’s adversaries “likely learned lessons” from the political turmoil that engulfed the U.S. after Election Day in 2020, senior U.S. intelligence officials told reporters last month. That means Russia, China and Iran are likely to amp up their efforts to spread lies and even incite violence between Election Day and inauguration.
One key defense is to refer any pressing questions to your local officials. “The bottom line when it comes to mis- and disinformation is that voters need to go to the source, and the source is your local and your state election officials,” said Marci Andino, the senior director of the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center.
But more blunt remedies might be worth exploring, too — like giving yourself a break from social media for a bit.
