On Friday afternoon, with only a few days left in the presidential race, the federal agencies that help safeguard American elections issued a warning to voters about a video that had been circulating online. It appeared to show immigrants voting illegally in Georgia, and U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that it was the latest in a series of fakes produced by “Russian influence actors.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” read the statement from the FBI and two other federal agencies, who warned that Russia would continue to creating and spreading these fakes even in the weeks and months after the elections.
For anyone who lived through the last two presidential ballots, the statement may have seemed familiar. Eight years have passed since the 2016 U.S. election was tainted with disinformation attributed to Moscow, and the government has not found a way to deter this kind of meddling. Instead the problem has gotten messier.
China and Iran now use the same tactics in trying to influence U.S. voters, while the number of these operations linked to the Kremlin has multiplied over the past eight years from two to more than 70, says Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, which tracks and often exposes foreign influence operations. “They now have thousands of people working in this space,” he says of the Russians.
A long list of government agencies are working to counter these threats, ranging from the FBI to more obscure bureaucracies like the 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 withing the Department of Homeland Security known as CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which co-authored Friday’s statement alongside with the FBI.
Charged with securing everything from the electric grid to its banking system from malicious cyber attacks, CISA also often takes the lead in protecting U.S. elections. Its short history says a lot about the difficulty of its mission. Organized in response to the Russian influence operation of 2016, the agency’s first director, Christopher Krebs, was fired by then-President Trump for publicly defending the integrity of the election Trump lost in 2020. (Krebs learned of his dismissal via a presidential tweet.)
Republicans in the House have since tried unsuccessfully to slash CISA’s budget. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has accused the agency of trying to censor political speech, and there is growing concern among Democrats that Trump would gut the agency if he wins the presidential race.
The controversy has put CISA in an awkward spot. Alongside its mission of securing election infrastructure, it has been forced to deal with a “firehose of disinformation” aimed at the American public, says Cait Conley, a senior adviser at CISA working on election security. The agency’s response, she says, “is to flood the zone with accurate information.”
CISA’s director, Jen Easterly, has gone on a media tour to reassure voters that the outcome of the ballot can be trusted. Last year the agency also launched a podcast called CISA Live, whose monthly episodes offer the same message alongside discussions of Chinese cyber threats and advice on what gadgets to buy as gifts for the holidays. On YouTube, they rarely get more than a thousand views, far less than the roughly 3000 people who work at CISA.
Now consider what they’re up against. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, more than two dozen of the most popular podcasts in the country have amplified claims that the upcoming election will be rigged. The main source of that message has been Trump, who has never backed down from his claims that the 2020 elections were stolen from him. His ally in the current race is Elon Musk, the owner of a social network where much of our political discourse plays out.
“A lot of times we try to blame some of that distrust on foreign threat actors, but the reality is that particular narrative is very much home grown,” says Olga Belogolova, an expert on disinformation at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It might be amplified by foreign threat actors, Russian, Chinese, Iranian,” she says. “But those narratives are disseminated by U.S. officials and candidates.”
Since 2016, Americans have grown more receptive to them. One survey conducted last year by Monmouth University found that two out of three Republicans believe voter fraud determined the results of the vote in 2020. Another poll, released this month by NPR, PBS News and Marist, found that a majority of Americans are worried about voter fraud in the current ballot, 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. She describes it as a game of Whack-a-mole, with new accounts appearing to replace those that had been removed. The work seemed useful but also frustrating, she says, because her team took down fakes without offering anything in their place. “You have to find ways to tell stories that are compelling to people, so that they have something to believe in,” she says. “I think that’s the task right now.”
In trying to meet that challenge, CISA has tried to amplify reliable sources of information. In the middle of October, it reacted to a fake video that appeared online, showing the destruction of what appeared to be mail-in ballots for Trump. State election officials took only a few hours to debunk the video, and the FBI blamed Russian actors for 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 disinformation.
Watts, the threat analyst at Microsoft, says such rapid reactions help to slow the spread of these clips online, as news outlets are quickly able to identify them a fake. But they can still rack up millions of views on social media, because plenty of Americans are willing to share them. While government agencies have gotten more effective in responding to election interference since 2016, the American public has become more suspicious about the conduct of elections.
That challenge to the democratic process could prove a lot more difficult to handle. As Watts puts it: “That’s all about restoring trust over time.”
