Post-election vote tallying raises fresh security concerns

WASHINGTON — Election Day came and went without any overt signs of foreign interference affecting the vote, but that doesn't mean the risk has faded.

A prolonged vote-tallying period in swing states raises the prospect of multiple security concerns, including foreign or domestic disinformation campaigns that could sow doubt in the process as well as actual digital manipulation of vote tabulation. There have been no indications, nevertheless, of any foreign activity that could alter the vote count or stop votes from being tallied.

A look at some of the potential problems in the days ahead:

Disinformation spread

Intentionally false information and propaganda have been constant during the 2020 presidential contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Bid en, including threatening but fake emails that were sent to Democratic voters last month that U.S. officials have linked to Iran.

There's no reason to expect disinformation to stop now. It could even become more prevalent as troublemakers at home and abroad seek to create further tension and chaos and to exploit the lingering uncertainty surrounding the vote by inventing bogus claims.

By Wednesday morning, inauthentic Twitter accounts were promoting false or unverified allegations of fraud or advancing Trump's unsupported claims of impropriety in the counting of ballots, said Christopher Bouzy, the creator of Botsentinel.com, a platform to detect disinformation on social media. Those include social media claims that Trump supporters were not able to vote because of broken machines or reiterating Trump's baseless claims about counterfeit ballots, Bouzy said.

In addition, state- owned Russian and Iranian media have been exaggerating election-related unrest in the U.S., said Clint Watts and Rachel Chernaskey, foreign influence experts who appeared in an online forum Wednesday hosted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Groups within the U.S. are using their own private networks to spread fake information in hopes of mobilizing protests in the coming days, they said.