Tag: election security
With 1000 Complaints Of Election Threats, Garland Has Gotten One Conviction

With 1000 Complaints Of Election Threats, Garland Has Gotten One Conviction

A Department of Justice task force to combat violent threats against election workers has received more than 1,000 referrals since it was launched in July 2021but has only secured one conviction, a House committee was told on Wednesday.

“It’s received well over 1,000 reports of threats, but it’s only secured one conviction,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), House Homeland Security Committee vice chair. “Which raises the question, ‘Why only one conviction?”

At the committee hearing on the election security landscape, the lack of accountability was also tied to local police. These departments were reluctant topress charges after being contacted by the election officials, the committee was told, because police officers often did not know where the legal line was between illegal threatening conduct and permissible political speech.

“Law enforcement, in many cases, is unaware that issues on Election Day or leading up to the election can be a real threat or a real issue,” said Neal Kelly, who now chairs the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which seeks to educate police on this issue, and was formerly the registrar of voters in Orange County,California, and was a police officer before that.

“Beat officers, officers on the ground, just are not familiar with criminal code for election violations or that threats to election officials are occurring in large numbers,” he said. “When I was in Orange County, I had police officers respond to some scenes and they just thought it was a civil matter. They were not aware that there were actually criminal violations that occurred at a vote center.”

The House hearing comes as 2022’s general election is heating up and there is disagreement over what are the biggest ongoing threats facing voters, election officials and American democracy. Polls conducted since the House January 6Committee has been holding hearings detailing ex-President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have shown many voters, especiallyindependents, want the provocateurs and insurrectionists held accountable.

“The threats to election security vary widely in the United States,” said Torres.“There’s the threat of a cyberattack on election infrastructure. There’s the threat of influence operations that radicalized people with misinformation and disinformation… And there’s a threat of violence and harassment and intimidation against election officials themselves.”

Torres asked which threat was mostly likely to “endanger” the 2022 midterms.

Elizabeth Howard, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and NewYork University law school and a former Virginia state election official, replied that widespread threats to election officials were her top concern “because of the cascading effects that result.”

“What we’re seeing across the country are election officials who are deciding to leave the profession,” she said. “So, for example, five of Arizona’s 15 counties now have new election directors this cycle. Six of Georgia’s most populous counties have new election directors this cycle. This crates the potential for more mis- and disinformation because the people taking the retiring election officials’ place are not going to have the same level of experience [running elections].”

Kelly said that the 2020 election “amplified” the harassment, but “I’ve heard them before. If you go back to 2018 in Orange County, there was a number of similarthreats and issues arose when we had congressional districts flip from red to blue... It’s not just at the national level. It can certainly happen at the local level.We see that, and I will say this, it’s not just the battleground states.”

“In every single election we see rumors, we see myths and disinformation,” saidNew Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, who had toleave her home and have police protection after the 2020 election and after herstate’s recent 2022 primary. “Those rumors rend to peter out.”“Unfortunately, we are still on a daily basis, in my state and across the country ,living with the reverberating effects of the big lie from 2020,” she continued. “The recent activities that happened in my state where we almost failed to certify an entire county’s worth of votes in a primary election [Otero County] are a direct result of that rhetoric.”

At Wednesday’s hearing, Democratic members were united in squarely blaming Trump’s false stolen election claims, and, to a lesser degree, social media platforms, that paired conspiracy-minded people with conspiracy theorists, for the uptick in threatened violence. Republican members, in contrast, said increased federal oversight of state-run elections was their top worry, and often went on to repeat Trumpian conspiracy theories about 2020.

“Isn’t it true, by implication, that the ballots cast in Wisconsin – by absentee dropbox deposited ballots were illegal in the 2020 election?,” asked Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), referring to a July 2022 ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court that banned their use one month before the state’s upcoming primary.

“I cannot speak to the ins and outs of the specific legality, the constitutional questions that came forth in Wisconsin,” Oliver replied. “What I can tell you is that in states like mine, where we have secure 24-hour monitored systems that are permissible under state law, [that] we do not see the level of concern. And frankly, the alleged fraud, the alleged fraud that has been leveled against such ballot collection systems.”

These kinds of exchanges evaded the central question of what the most pressing security threat was facing upcoming midterm elections. And just as important, what could or should be done to counter election-centered threats and violence?

“When something like 40 percent of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen, about 60 to 70 percent of Republicans… clearly, that is the root cause of the threats of violence that many nonpartisan election officials are facing,” said Rep. Tom. Malinowski (D-NJ) addressing Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, where polls have found 62 percent of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen. “What should responsible leaders in our country be doing to address that false belief out there?”

“I guess I find the silver lining to every cloud – that folks are interested in this topic right now at a level that they would not normally be,” replied LaRose. “I view this as an opportunity to educate people about the safeguards that exist, and make sure that information is available in every part of our state.”

Only Torres, the committee vice chair, asked about the Justice Department’s election threats task force and why it only had one conviction.“Is the issue one of law and the law is insufficiently protective of election workers or is it one of enforcement?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“The DOJ task force has taken important steps but clearly what they’ve done is not enough,” Howard replied, summarizing more detailed written testimony. “We think that they need to expand the task force to include state and local law enforcement. As our Brennan Center survey showed, almost nine out of 10 election officials who had been threatened reported those threats not to federal officials, but to their local law enforcement.”

The DOJ did not send any officials to testify. But later in the hearing, Kelly amplified Howard’s comments by noting that most local police officers are unfamiliar with election-related crimes and are reluctant to present cases to local prosecutors.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Washington, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke to reporters and pushed back on the accusation that the DOJ wasn’t doing enoughto hold perpetrators of 2020-related election violence accountable.

Garland replied:

“There is a lot of speculation about what the Justice Department is doing, what it’s not doing, what our theories are, what are theories aren’t, and there will continue to be that speculation. That’s because a central tenet of the way in which the Justice Department investigates — a central tenet of the rule of law — is that we do not do our investigations in public. This is the most wide-ranging investigation and the most important investigation that the Justice Department has ever entered into. And we have done so because this represents, this effort to upend a legitimate election, transferring power from one administration to another, cuts at the fundamental of American democracy. We have to get this right. And for people who are concerned, as I think every American should be about protecting democracy, we have to do two things. We have to hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election. And we must do it in a way filled with integrity and professionalism – the way the Justice Department conducts investigations. Both of these are necessary in order to achieve justice and to protect our democracy.”

Garland was referring primarily to crimes surrounding the planning and execution of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In contrast, testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee concerned the ongoing and current threats to local and state election officials by believers in the big lie, where local and federal police, for differing reasons, have barely held those threatening violence to account.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

election 2020

Study: How Online Propagandists Targeted The 2020 Election

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Partisan disinformation to undermine 2020's presidential election shadowed every step of the voting process last year but took an unprecedented turn when the earliest false claims morphed into intricate conspiracies as Election Day passed and President Trump worked to subvert the results, according to two of the nation's top experts tracking the election propaganda.

At the general election's outset, as states wrapped up their primaries and urged voters to use mailed-out ballots in response to the pandemic, false claims began surfacing online—in tweets, social media posts, text messages, reports on websites, videos and memes—targeting the stage in the electoral process that was before voters. These attacks on the nuts and bolts of voting, from registration to the steps to obtain and cast a ballot, began as "claims of hacking and voter fraud… [that] honed [in] on specific events," said Matt Masterson, who helped lead the Department of Homeland Security's election security team.

"This is a lot of what we talked about with you at CISA [the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] in the lead-up [to Election Day], anticipating that were there were problems experienced, and then in the contested elections, those would be used to blow out of proportion or lie about what was actually taking place," Masterson said, speaking to the nation's state election directors in early February at a winter 2021 conference.

But as November 3's Election Day approached and the vote-counting continued afterward in presidential battleground states, Masterson and a handful of teams working inside and outside of government to trace and track disinformation, and to urge online platforms and sources to curb their false content, saw an unexpected development. The narrowly focused threads that attacked earlier steps in the process of running elections swapped out purported villains and protagonists and became a full-blown conspiratorial tapestry attacking the results.

"They all got combined into one big narrative… one large lie to try to undermine confidence in the election," said Masterson, whose presentation at the National Association of State Election Directors' (NASED) meeting traced this evolution.

"Misinformation is the frontier in election security and election integrity," said Aaron Wilson, senior director for election security at the Center for Internet Security, which tracked 209 cases of misleading or deliberately false attacks on voting, at the same NASED forum.

Early Predictable Attacks

Masterson's and Wilson's presentations were some of the most detailed analyses yet tracing the evolution of propagandistic attacks on 2020's voting process and election administration. The Stanford Internet Observatory, where Masterson is a fellow, will release a full report—including naming the biggest purveyors of 2020 election disinformation, both the platforms and their highest-volume users—later this winter.

Election officials knew they would be targets for partisan misinformation (mistaken claims) and disinformation (intentionally distorted claims) in 2020. Their first lines of defense, following the cyber intrusions by Russia in 2016, were hardening their infrastructure—the computers that run elections—and creating clearinghouses to rapidly communicate about threats and responses among the nation's more than 8,000 election jurisdictions. Masterson and Wilson led efforts within this sphere, where, by all accounts, 2020 saw no major cybersecurity breaches.

But while election officials were pleased with the steps they were taking inside their state and local offices, the outside attacks on the nuts and bolts of voting kept building during the general election. The early attacks were narrowly focused but shrewd, noted Wilson, who said election disinformation's purveyors exploited the public's lack of knowledge of how elections are run. As Masterson noted, the initial wave cited procedural steps to claim voter fraud and hacking.

For example, as voting rights groups sent absentee ballot applications to voters in swing states, posts appeared on social media falsely stating that voters—and dead people—were receiving multiple ballots, Wilson said. As states put up online voter registration portals to assist voters during the pandemic, online posts falsely asserted that voter information could be sabotaged—altered by political opponents to block would-be voters. When early in-person voting began, false claims erupted about when and where to vote, using ballot drop boxes, the results (before there were any), and votes being thrown out.

"A theme that permeated the misinformation that was reported to us was that it really resulted from or took advantage of people's lack of knowledge of how elections are run," Wilson said.

In the week before Election Day and in its immediate aftermath, the volume of misinformation and disinformation increased. Half of CIS's cases emerged in this period. As the process shifted to casting ballots and counting votes, more conspiratorial narratives emerged where the vote-counting process became the target—and the villains were swapped to fit the new storyline.

Masterson offered two examples of this transition. The first showed how ex-President Trump's fervent supporters rapidly embraced the false claim that Trump votes were being disqualified because of the pens they used to mark their ballots. The second example showed how older false claims were updated and expanded in ways not seen in prior election propaganda.

More Than Echo Chambers

The first example was "Sharpiegate," which emerged on November 4, a day after Election Day.

"Sharpiegate was, of course, the claim that using Sharpies [pens] on ballots either invalidated the ballots or the votes weren't counted," said Masterson. "It originated in Arizona. And what you saw was these messages really begin to take off. Of the 100 messages that were shared [on Twitter], they got 200,000 or more retweets, or likes, or furtherances."

Within hours, fact-check organizations like PolitiFact posted responses on Twitter, he said. But those posts barely drew more than 10,000 viewers on November 4 and the next day, whereas the "#Sharpiegate" retweets escalated to 20 times that volume. Masterson said Sharpiegate showed "how quickly a narrative can take off, and despite really good efforts to push back, how fast people will latch onto a false or misleading narrative."

The episode didn't stop there—and showed how the architecture of online communications amplified a patently false claim to an audience primed to receive it.

"It started in Arizona, but it didn't take much time to then have those claims alleged in other states, other jurisdictions, Michigan specifically, even if the same [voting] systems, the same pens, Sharpies, weren't used at all," Masterson said.

Election officials did not sit idly by. The secretaries of state in Arizona and Michigan, and county election departments in those states, all responded with their own tweets on November 4, he said. Their rebuttals took the best form at dispelling misinformation: first stating facts, then addressing the disinformation's claims, and then laying out other information, he said.

Notably, two Arizona NBC TV affiliates reported on the fabricated controversy and posted on its Twitter page, "Sharpies do not invalidate ballots," Masterson recounted, showing slides of the posts. "Those are two local television stations pushing back, offering facts, [yet] along the side there, in the comments, people are basically saying, 'You're lying,' 'You're incorrect,' 'You don't know what we are talking about…' 'You're covering it up.'"

Masterson then turned to his second case study, which showed "the building of the conspiracy or narrative around a fraudulent election."

Hammer And Scorecard Becomes Dominion

Masterson started with a November 2018 post on a social media page for QAnon, which is an increasingly popular and layered far-right conspiracy that, among other things, baselessly accuses leading Democrats of operating pedophile rings and drinking the blood of children. The 2018 post includes "claims or theories—false, incorrect—that DHS [the Department of Homeland Security—where Masterson was a senior adviser for election security] was putting watermarks and isotopes on ballots in order to track those ballots to track voter fraud."

"It was not new to 2020. But it built. It grew. The narrative got more and more complex as it went on," he said. "And 'Ballotgate' became a phrase that started with that tighter conversation around how DHS was going to track voter fraud and crack down on it, and began to be used to describe any claims of any manipulation of any ballots… which then grew into 'Hammer and Scorecard."

"For those of you not familiar, Hammer and Scorecard was a claim that there were two pieces of software that U.S. intelligence had developed to use internationally to rig [voting] systems, and the two pieces of software allowed for the manipulation of the systems in it," he continued. There were several versions of this claim. One said that foreign governments were using the software against Trump. Another claimed that federal officials were using this software against Trump. Another blamed unspecified domestic "bad actors."

The "obviously, demonstrably false" Hammer and Scorecard story drew hundreds of thousands of retweets and shares in the week after Election Day, Masterson noted. By the next weekend, the related traffic on Parler—an unregulated platform favored by Trump supporters until it was taken offline in January—escalated into hundreds of thousands of messages, as traced hashtags. Those conversations then began to blend with claims that Dominion Voting Systems, whose balloting and counting machines were used in a few swing states, were secretly stealing Trump votes.

"Hammer and Scorecard morphs into, instead of just this CIA-, intelligence community-focused theory, to then begin to talk about Dominion and the various conspiracies about Dominion," he said. Theories about unadvertised counting features on voting systems being used by insiders to steal votes have circulated among the political left for two decades, Masterson noted.

"But now they got all combined into one big narrative that used Hammer and Scorecard, and Dominion, and other systems into one large lie to try to undermine confidence in the election," he said, "to the point… [where] there were conversations [by Republican legislators in Arizona] about the seizure of voting systems. That should make any state election official's skin crawl and shudder. Because none of it is true, and yet there's this push to use the lie to undermine the results completely."

More Transparency, More Propaganda

Masterson and Wilson discussed other 2020 trends that had unexpected consequences that fed the stolen election narrative. By many measures—live video streams, public and press viewing areas, partisan election observers—the 2020 presidential election was the most transparent ever. But some of those public images were put forth as false evidence of election theft, they said. Images of ballot drop boxes and storage bins were top examples, where pro-Trump pundits and bloggers claimed that the images showed vote theft in progress.

"The same goes for data," Masterson said. "We have more data available around elections than we've ever had before. I think that's only going to increase. That is, again, a positive, a good thing. But we saw over and over again the misapplication of election data, whether it was election night reporting… [or] vote totals—you know, the claims that there were dumps of votes, even though election officials had messages over and over and over again [about] how the vote count was going to proceed."

More insidious were statistical reports that purported to show vote count irregularities from academics and others who had little experience running elections or that made big assumptions—such as that registered Republicans would only vote for Trump. "I know [MIT election scholar] Charles Stewart and the folks at Stanford [Internet Observatory and its partners] just picked apart all these statistical inaccuracies and claims. But [those making the claims were] using the data to create really good-looking but completely misleading and incorrect charts… to undermine confidence."

Masterson said that foreign adversaries, such as Russia and Iran, both overtly and covertly drew on the domestic disinformation campaigns to fan an already chaotic election—for example, there were reports of Iranian intelligence officials posing as the far-right Proud Boys and sending threatening emails to Democrats.

He praised some statewide election officials, such as Wisconsin's Meagan Wolfe and Georgia's Gabriel Sterling, for being constant presences that debunked disinformation. He said that a constant media presence was needed in 2020 and would be needed in future elections.

"The more avenues that it's coming at people, the more likely they are to both see it and digest it, because they are seeing it [disinformation] from multiple sources," he said. "The response to these claims needs to be a continued broad push of transparency and facts, not recoiling and saying, 'It doesn't matter. It's already too late…'

The Platforms Feint Response

Masterson and Wilson ended their NASED presentations on upbeat notes. But their analyses underscored that online disinformation attacking the voting process was often more effective in its ability to propel cynical partisan beliefs than factual rebuttals.

Immediately after their talk, another little-known aspect to combatting 2020's misinformation emerged. The next panel featured representatives from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They defended how their platforms dealt with the falsehoods on their perches, such as posting labels on posts that were disputed or false, posting voter alerts, and occasionally taking down posts.

When the time for questions came, the very officials who avoided cybersecurity breaches in 2020, who pivoted to voting by mail and early voting in the pandemic, and who presided over America's highest-turnout presidential election sat in grim silence.

"I'll jump in," said Judd Choate, Colorado's elections director. "There was a real concentrated effort to dismiss or undercut all the basic tenets of the way we operate elections."

"We had Sharpiegate. We had attacks on our voting systems and on our election policies, claims of fraudulent votes, dead voters, and so forth, all of which we have the facts. We have the ability and wherewithal to… attack on each one of those claims," he said.

But after Election Day, when counting votes was under attack and new narratives emerged that attacked the accuracy of the results and election's legitimacy, Choate said that the platforms' ban on political ads prevented officials from responding to falsities filling their platforms.

"Colorado, in particular, made several attempts to purchase time on Google, and [we] were rebuffed every time. We were categorized as a political ad. We're clearly not a political ad. We were the facts. We were the trusted voice," he said, adding that Colorado met similar obstacles at Facebook.

"Going forward… we need the ability to be proactive," he said. "And we really didn't have it in this post-election environment."

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.


#EndorseThis: John Oliver Delivers Dire Warning On 2020 Election Security

#EndorseThis: John Oliver Delivers Dire Warning On 2020 Election Security

John Oliver exists to warn us about scary threats to our country — and as he points out this week, no threat is scarier a year before November 2020 than the sorry state of our election system. Republican resistance to the modernizing steps that would protect US elections has aroused Oliver’s suspicions. Their party is led, after all, by a president who encouraged foreign interference in 2016 and faces impeachment now for doing the same thing again.

Evidently the Republicans oppose basic safeguards like maintaining a paper audit trail (although that is endorsed by Trump himself) and keeping voting machines off the Internet, where tampering is so easy — or, as Oliver bellows, so effing easy.

Don’t miss his little video clip of Vladimir Putin, boasting with a smile that Russian intelligence services are actively intervening in next year’s presidential race, presumably to boost his puppet pal in the White House. And as Oliver says, don’t forget to vote tomorrow if you live in a state with an off-year election.

Only Last Week Tonight can make a subject so terrifying so funny. Click, laugh, and learn.

McConnell And Trump: Democracy’s Enemies Within

McConnell And Trump: Democracy’s Enemies Within

Among the most disturbing moments during the last presidential election cycle occurred in September 2016, when a group of top intelligence officials briefed congressional leaders on the Kremlin’s aggressive hacking campaign.

Aiming for bipartisan unity against a threat from a hostile foreign power, then-President Obama sent his counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to a secret meeting on Capitol Hill with the “Gang of 12” — leaders of both parties in the House and Senate plus the chairs and ranking members of the homeland security and intelligence committees. They asked the congressional leaders to join together and urge state and local election officials to protect the vote from Russian hacking with the assistance of federal authorities.

Patriotic instinct might have motivated most of the leaders to cooperate. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell objected, vehemently, to any such pushback against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agents. Not only did he question the intelligence community’s findings about Russian interference but he also warned that he considered any such public rebuke of Moscow a partisan attempt by the White House to turn the election.

Obama backed down, which proved to be a historic blunder. And McConnell got a Republican president and a Cabinet position for his wife, Trump’s transportation secretary, Elaine Chao — who has used that position to enrich her family of Chinese shipping magnates.

Although there was plenty of evidence by September 2016 that the Russians were seeking to interfere in our election on behalf of their preferred candidate Trump, McConnell seized on lingering doubts to conceal from voters what intelligence officials knew. He has no such excuses now, after the Mueller report and many previous reports have dispelled any doubt about Putin’s active measures.

Indeed, we now know that their intelligence services penetrated deeply into state election networks. While there is no evidence that those hacks changed any votes, it is entirely possible that the Russians will attempt to do so next time — and may well possess the capability.

And yet, the Republican leader still refuses to take action to protect our elections from the next assault by the Russians, in 2020. He has repeatedly blocked bipartisan bills that seek to enhance election security from reaching the Senate floor. In fact, McConnell has killed at least three such bills within the past few months.

First he knocked off the Secure Elections Act, sponsored by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and James Lankford (R-OK), which would empower the Department of Homeland Security to oversee and coordinate national efforts to counter any foreign entities’ attempts to interfere in U.S. elections; and fund improved cybersecurity programs for state and local election authorities. According to Klobuchar, McConnell and the White House stopped that legislation in a joint effort.

Then the Senate leader and the Trump gang teamed up against a pair of bipartisan bills approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by the president’s obsequious pal Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Like the Secure Elections Act, those bills would have sought to deter outside incursions into U.S. elections — and would have made hacking into a state voting system a federal crime.

McConnell worked in tandem with the Trump White House to stall this vital legislation before the 2020 election, presumably to save the president any embarrassment over vetoing it. Neither McConnell nor Trump has stated their exact objections to protecting our election systems. (Someone should ask Putin directly.)

When Robert Mueller spoke publicly about the findings of his investigation as he resigned from the Justice Department, he warned that all Americans should concern themselves with the Russians’ 2016 attack — obviously because it will happen again. Security and intelligence officials across the country have uttered that same warning, more than once. And both the Republican Senate majority and the White House have stymied any action to protect the integrity of our democracy.

Perhaps we should turn our attention now to the enemies within.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.