Vote tallying raises fresh security concerns
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. Even so, there have been no indications of any foreign activity that could alter the vote count or stop votes from being tallied.
Intentionally false information and propaganda have been constant during the 2020 contest between President Donald Trump and former vice-president Joe Biden, including threatening but fake emails that were sent to Democratic voters last month that US 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 US, 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 US are using their own private networks to spread fake information in hopes of mobilising protests in the coming days, they said.
“If the election was a hockey match for disinformation, we are right at the first intermission and we’re just dropping the puck for the second period. The period from now to Inauguration Day, regardless of the outcome, is going to be extremely chaotic in terms of the information space and knowing what to believe,” Watts said.