In Colorado, a clerical error quickly spun into an election conspiracy. ‘This is voter-fraud fearmongering.’
(Bloomberg) — A nightmare scenario unfolded for election officials across Colorado last month.
A clerical error resulted in 30,000 non-citizens being sent postcards encouraging them to vote, according to Secretary of State Jena Griswold.
She said her office took swift action, issuing press statements and sending letters to those impacted alerting them of the mistake. By then, a conspiracy theory had taken hold that the mailing was an intentional ploy by Griswold, a Democrat, to flood the ballot with illegal immigrant votes.
“Suddenly Donald Trump is pushing out this disinformation and then right-wing folks start talking about hanging me,” Griswold said.
The reaction to the blunder tells a wider story about politics ahead of the upcoming midterms, one that election officials and disinformation experts worry has the potential to undermine trust in the results nationwide.
Fears about US adversaries waging cyberattacks or influence campaigns to influence the election remain. But administrative mistakes and other minor snafus may now be just as likely to undermine an election, according to cybersecurity and political experts.
“There’s going to be some amount of error in the process,” said Mike Caulfield, research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, referring to the US’s unique and complex voting system across more than 3,000 counties.
This siloed nature is beneficial, however, as the election infrastructure is built in a way that “these errors are not the impactful ones.”
That said, Caulfield said he worries that a small voting machine or database glitch could “be leveraged and portrayed as a breach in the voting systems to the general public–and used to undermine the legitimacy of the election.”
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a note to election officials last month—a day before news of the Colorado incident broke—warning that foreign groups might spread false claims about such things as cyberattacks on election systems and ballot fraud to sow discord.
“These foreign actors may create and knowingly disseminate false claims and narratives regarding voter suppression, voter or ballot fraud, and other false information intended to undermine confidence in the election processes and influence public opinion of the elections’ legitimacy,” the Oct.
6 memo stated.
But the homegrown disinformation may pose just as big of a threat, according to David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a former election official.
“What happened in Colorado demonstrates that those who believe elections are illegitimate are willing to go to almost any means to prove it, particularly when they are bad faith actors,” Levine said.
“If someone was questioning this in good faith, they would be asking officials what they are doing to prevent the problem,” he added.
“But that’s not what folks are doing here – this is voter-fraud fearmongering.”
Several recent incidents have shown the potential for relatively minor incidents to quickly spin into viral conspiracies.
On October 27, Fox 10 television station in Phoenix stated that it mistakenly published mock election results from the Associated Press during a live news broadcast, showing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs with 53% of the vote, over Republican candidate Kari Lake.
The station tried to correct the mistake, saying on Twitter and Facebook it was a test that never should have aired.
But Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona who voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, shared a photo of the screen on Twitter and asked, “Is this the same Fox News that called Arizona for Biden 5 minutes after the polls closed?” Thousands of others chimed in on social media, raising suspicions and expressing their lack of faith in elections and the media.
In another instance, an election worker in Michigan was charged with two felonies in September after allegedly inserting a USB stick into a computer containing voter registration data.
The arrest was connected to the alleged theft of registration data, not ballots, and there was no suggestion of vote tampering.
Nonetheless, it led to online claims that Michigan’s voting system was unsafe.
The Colorado faux pas occurred when officials at the Secretary of State’s office pulled data from the Division of Motor Vehicles database to find people who hadn’t signed up to vote, according to Griswold. Unbeknown to them, the database included immigrants who can live legally in the US but aren’t eligible to vote, she said.
In the days following the mishap, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, suggested on Twitter that the mistake was a deliberate act and articles appeared in Fox News and The Federalist making similar claims. On his Truth Social platform, former President Donald Trump shared a headline with quotation marks around the word “accidental” – a grammatical wink suggesting just the opposite.
Neither Cruz nor the Trump Organization responds to requests for comment.
In the three days after the incident was revealed, tweets mentioning Colorado registration mailers jumped from zero to 300 per hour, according to researchers at the University of Washington.
“It’s hard to stand up to these election conspiracy theory folks and to push for trust in the system,” said Chuck Broerman, the clerk and recorder for El Paso County, Colorado, who set up an emergency phone bank to debunk any myths.
“The episode with the registration cards did not help at all.”
Broerman was previously chair of his local Republican party but feels ostracized for refusing to deny the 2020 vote was legitimate. Ahead of the midterms, he said he has security and stringent cybersecurity measures in place to ensure the voting infrastructure is secure.
But he and other election officials are struggling to tackle the vulnerabilities created by social media-fueled rumors.
“People like Ted Cruz know exactly what they are doing,” said Griswold. “Even when folks know they are lies, they use them as a basis to strip eligible Americans, Republicans, Democrats and the unaffiliated of their constitutional right to vote.”
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