Election officials are hustling to fight misinformation in real time as early voting begins
CNN
The election misinformation machine is already ramping up in critical battleground states as early voting gets underway, and election officials are hustling to combat falsehoods in real time.
The election misinformation machine is already ramping up in critical battleground states as early voting gets underway, and election officials are hustling to combat falsehoods in real time. Conservatives have been sharing uncorroborated instances of machines flipping votes, claims of widespread fraud in mail ballots and suggestions that election officials are subverting the process if it takes multiple days to count ballots. The claims are ricocheting around social media as voters hit the polls. They mirror claims that former President Donald Trump and his allies spread around the 2020 election as they tried to head off Trump’s loss to now-President Joe Biden. State and local election officials, however, are also preparing for a deluge of false and misleading claims, and are actively trying to address issues before they go far. “Our humble ask is that before people swallow whole what they see in their social media feed, they at least verify it against a trusted source,” Minnesota Secretary of State and president of the National Association of Secretaries of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told reporters this week. Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Alliance for Securing Democracy who’s focused on election-related disinformation, said that some of the push is needed because social media companies have stepped back from challenging false claims. “It’s reassuring how much better election officials have gotten around communication in advance of the election,” Schafer said. “There definitely wasn’t the same level of interaction four years ago … in trying to communicate any changes in how voting will work this time, and, to the extent possible, short-circuit some of the false election narratives we know will be coming.”
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