With 2024 campaign growing intense, watchdogs warn of election threats

Voter intimidation, an exodus of election workers fed up with harassment and continued misinformation and disinformation campaigns threaten the integrity of the November elections, officials with the government watchdog group Common Cause are saying.

This year will be the first presidential election since “the big lie,” Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomón said this week on a video call with reporters.

She was referring to the effort by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to undermine Trump’s reelection loss in 2020 by promoting a series of unfounded conspiracy theories and encouraging supporters to obstruct Congress’ certification of the results on Jan. 6, 2021.

Common Cause is a nonpartisan organization and Solomón and other speakers did not mention Trump, who is again the Republican nominee for president, by name.

But Solomón said the country’s election integrity was damaged by the 2020 experience, with many veteran election workers opting to leave the profession rather than deal with the threats and harassment from believers in election conspiracies.

“We’re still living with the legacy of those lies,” she said. “They’ve undermined the faith of many Americans in our elections and fed anger and heated rhetoric … Those lies have also led to threats and harassment to election officials who have seen massive turnover in their ranks.”

On top of those challenges, election workers and voters also must deal this cycle with improving generative artificial intelligence tools that make disinformation easier than ever, Common Cause experts said.

And state laws, such as a measure that went into effect in Florida after the 2022 elections to cancel automatic delivery of vote-by-mail ballots, promise further confusion and disenfranchisement, they said.

To combat those threats to election integrity, the group is gearing up for campaign-season education drives.

Threats of violence

Instances of actual political violence remain rare, said Suzanne Almeida, a Common Cause director of state operations who also leads the group’s work on political violence.

But threats, militant language, doxing and other harassment continue, Almeida said.

That has affected election workers, with a recent study from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice finding that 38% of election workers had experienced threats and more than half of local election officials feared for their safety.

While surveys, including a recent University of California-Davis study, show that voters of both parties reject political violence, “candidates who have large platforms” have used them to drive turnout, Almeida said.

“We are seeing the normalization of hate, violent rhetoric, violent threats and harassment as a viable political strategy,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.

AI and misinformation

Intentional efforts to disinform voters and accidental spreading of misinformation remain a growing problem, Common Cause’s media and democracy program director Ishan Mehta said.

The expansion and improvement of generative artificial intelligence makes it easier to create and spread fraudulent campaign content.

“The ubiquity of these tools means that you don’t have to be a computer expert anymore to have misinformation that would convince a lot, over half the population,” Mehta said.

Social media platforms that surged misinformation enforcement after Jan. 6 have now backed off enforcing misinformation, he said.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, tweeted a doctored video of likely Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over the weekend. Musk, who has endorsed Trump, bought the platform in 2022. He boasts 192 million followers.

Florida law

Amy Keith, the executive director of Common Cause Florida, said recent changes to state election law will create confusion and deprive some voters of ballots.

More than 1.9 million Floridians who received a mail-in ballot in 2022 will not receive one this cycle, she said. The state enacted a law after that election that required voters to send new requests for mail-in ballots with additional identification.

“Even if some of those 1.9 million people might not wish to vote by mail this year, we know that thousands and thousands of Florida voters are likely expecting a mail ballot to arrive in their mailbox,” she said. “And it isn’t going to.”

Ahead of the state’s Aug. 20 primary, Common Cause and allied groups are “really working to spread the message” to voters that they need to request a mail-in ballot if they wish to vote that way, and that they can vote in person even if they have requested a mail ballot, Keith said.

Deploying poll monitors

While predicting widespread violence on Election Day would not happen, Common Cause Pennsylvania Executive Director Philip Hensley-Robin anticipated some instances of political violence or intimidation.

The group would send “hundreds of poll monitors” across the commonwealth to record such instances, with monitors who will also be trained in deescalation, he said.

Hensley-Robin began his remarks by acknowledging the “tragic events” of the assassination attempt on Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., but said the “isolated incident” would not deter voters from turning out.

He also anticipated that some would mount “spurious” lawsuits to “disenfranchise voters and undermine public confidence” in the election, but predicted those would be quickly dismissed.

Trump’s campaign lost scores of lawsuits challenging 2020 election results.

Voter outreach

Solomón said Common Cause would be reminding voters to be on the lookout for misinformation and disinformation, especially from AI, and that it’s likely Election Day will end without a clear winner in the presidential race, a situation that has encouraged conspiracy theories about election fraud.

“That’s not a sign that anything is wrong,” she said.

The group will also be in touch with election workers to understand their needs and to offer assistance, she said.

She added that democracy had to be proactive.

“In the 2020 election, I think there was a false narrative that came out of that, and that was that democracy held and did what it was supposed to do,” she said. “And one of the things that I like to remind people of is that democracy did not hold. We made it hold.”

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