How state fought false election information

Office of Election Cybersecurity was on frontline of ' warm war'

One post on YouTube claimed a voter registered to vote under a fake name. A tweet alleged thousands of 2020 ballots were tossed out. Another tweet claimed a voter used an alias to vote in person.

These are just a few of two dozen social media posts deemed to be misinformation and removed from online platforms this year at the request of a newly formed cybersecurity team within the California Secretary of State’s office.

The Office of Election Cybersecurity in the California Secretary of State’s office monitored and tracked social media posts, decided if they were misinformation, stored the posts in an internal database coded by threat level, and on 31 different occasions requested posts be removed.

In 24 cases, the social media companies agreed and either took down the posts or flagged them as misinformation, according to Jenna Dresner, senior public information officer for the Office of Election Cybersecurity.

“We don’t take down posts, that is not our role to play,” Dresner said. “We alert potential sources of misinformation to the social media companies and we let them make that call based on community standards they created.”

Even with the new cybersecurity efforts, misinformation still was a primary cause of frustration for California’s registrars of voters. A CalMatters’ survey of 54 of California’s 58 counties found that registrars dealt with everything from false or misleading information coming from the White House to all sorts of preposterous claims posted to the internet.

As the state works with social media companies to quell speech it considers misinformation, First Amendment advocates and privacy experts say they are concerned about increased censorship of online discourse and the implications of a database that stores posts indefinitely.

The goal of the Office of Election Cybersecurity is to coordinate with county election officials to protect the integrity of the election process. Its duties also include monitoring and counteracting false or misleading online information regarding the electoral process and its integrity.

The office was established in 2018 because of foreign meddling in the 2016 election. With the passage of Assembly Bill 3075, the California state legislature established the Office of Election Cybersecurity with an annual budget of $ 2 million.

One of the first things the Office of Election Cybersecurity did was launch a 2018 voter education awareness campaign called VoteSure that encouraged voters to be on the lookout for misinformation. Initial monitoring was sparse — the Office mostly followed hashtags and tracked narratives via a complaint database. Dresner centralized the monitoring when she joined the office in July, and created a formal tracking system.

In 2018, state officials also started developing relationships with federal intelligence agencies and reaching out to social media companies. The Office of Election Cybersecurity worked to fully understand what happened in the 2016 election and the extent of foreign interference, Dresner said.