The X-Messengers Network: Claims About the Uniformed and Oversea Citizens Absentee Voting Act in the U.S.

There is no information on who is behind the network of accounts. Influence operations run by foreign governments are known to amplify domestic tensions to drive up tension and chaos in the U.S.

An researcher from the Institute for Science and Democracy got a push notification from X about one of the posts, even though he did not follow the account. The posts have been promoted on Telegram by accounts that share Russian propaganda as well as the message board 4chan.

A sign that accounts are coordinated is that many of the posts have the same language and images. The Democrats had it coming for not acting on voter ID laws. Republicans in many states have long pushed for stricter voter ID laws.

Despite the baseless claims about voting overseas, many of the accounts that were identified boasted that they voted for Trump in swing states.

The Uniformed and Oversea Citizens Absentee Voting Act is a law that allows military personnel and American citizens living overseas to vote. The allegations surrounding the law are a part of a larger narrative that the election will be stolen from Donald Trump because of the possibility that non citizens will vote in large numbers and swing the race.

The first post from the network was published on Oct. 22, a couple of weeks after Republicans filed lawsuits against voters in swing states. There are lawsuits that cast doubts on some overseas voters eligibility. In the fall of 2015, Trump made a false claim on his social media that the Democrats intended to use overseas ballots to manipulate the election results. The lawsuits have not found success in the courts.

Some of the accounts have shared images of ballots alongside passports, including from countries that no longer exist, including the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Prussia, the disinformation and extremism research organization reported. The accounts reinforce baseless narratives about voter fraud promoted by the former President. The picture of a French passport that is the most popular post on X, formerly Twitter, has over 12 million views.

There are no plans to destroy mail-in votes cast for former President Donald Trump. The Department of Defense did not give US soldiers the authority to use lethal force against Trump fans if the former president loses next week. And no, 180,000 Amish people did not register to vote in Pennsylvania—given there are only 92,600 Amish living in the state, including minors. Ron said Florida would not use the voting machines that are used in Canada. And municipalities in California are not allowing noncitizens to vote in this year’s presidential elections.

In 2020, major social media platforms proactively boosted election officials as authoritative sources of information, made misleading posts about voting less visible, and added warning labels to false claims. Now, Musk has cut most of X’s team policing the platform and removed many guardrails against false and misleading content.

“What worries me most about this year is that we have a much more opaque window into the penetration of these lies, no matter where they come from,” Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar, who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, tells WIRED. “Social media platforms have by and large stopped moderating such content, and just as worryingly, have cut off researcher access to data streams that allowed us to objectively report on the scale of these campaigns, all due to political pressure on disinformation researchers and social media platforms.”

“For a while there, every six months, they’d come up with a new conspiracy theory. It would be debunked. They will have an egg on their face. Adams said that they would return to their hole for six months. You only get so much to eat at that apple.

Election Officials Face An Uphill Battle to Fight Election Lyths: Articulated Politics Approaches a Political Candidate

In the face of that landscape, election officials say they are controlling what they can control. They’ve spent a large amount of time reaching out to skeptical voters over the last Four years, and now hope that their work will make people more willing to accept the election results.

He said that an artificial intelligence image of an election official breaking into a drop box would have a devastating effect. “That kind of imagery could literally spark violence in a close election after the fact and again undermine Americans’ confidence in our system.”

The most glaring example of this is the fact that the platforms have backed away from a more aggressive stance they took in 2020 and are more silent about the work they are doing. Facebook and Instagram users can opt out of Meta’s fact-checking program, while the text based social network, Threads, has become less focused on politics.

Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder in Mesa, Ariz., has been an outspoken debunker of election lies. If someone really wants to make something look strange, I believe they can do it.

Lopez said that election officers spend a lot of time producing content for social media, and it always kills him when he sees, like, three likes and it’s usually themselves, their statement person and their mom. “Election officials are trying to figure out, ‘Well, what else can I do to be heard?’”

She says that if you see something that looks suspicious and then take a picture of it, it can be misinterpreted and not taken into account.

Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies

What can we learn from Musk’s false claim that the election was stolen? A case study of a tech company, an informed public analyst, and the CISA Infrastructure

Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, said such “evidence generation infrastructure” is more robust this year. She said that when these efforts identify real issues with voting they tend to ignore the checks in the system that catch problems.

Musk lashed out at election officials when they tried to correct his false claims. The Michigan Secretary of State told CBS News that she received threats and harassment after she fact-checkd Musk’s claim that Michigan had more eligible citizens than registered voters.

Musk is a major point of baseless claims that Democrats are bringing in illegal immigrants to vote for them, and other Republicans are trying to lay the groundwork to claim the election was stolen should he lose.

A major communications platform is controlled by someone who raises false rumors about the election. Two years ago, the world’s richest man, Musk, took over Twitter and made the site into a pro-Trump megaphone.

Neil Makhija built a voting ice cream truck that he was going to use to travel his county and encourage people to vote. Cramer, in Charleston County, co-wrote a children’s book. An app was created by a man in Durham County, N.C., that could deliver election information to people there.

Increasingly election officials are thinking outside the box to reach voters, because trying to fight fire with fire on social media has felt like a losing battle for years now, says Carolina Lopez, a former election official from Miami-Dade County, Fla.

“The government needs to get this information out as quickly as possible, because literally the stakes are nothing less than our democracy,” Warner told NPR.

Last month, Warner wrote an open letter urging CISA to do more to help state and local governments identify and respond to election misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and to coordinate communications between the government, tech companies and researchers.

Cramer is an elections supervisor in Charleston County, South Carolina and said that it was important to get the message out first.

And local election officials are making more of an effort than ever before to seek out media attention and educate the public on their processes. State election officials in many swing states are holding multiple press conferences a week leading up to the election.

It’s your state and local election official that is the signal through that noise, so we want them to do that.

There is no evidence that foreign adversaries have broken into the voting or election systems. According to the election security expert, attackers do not have to succeed in order to undermine confidence.

DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI have issued joint public service announcements alerting Americans to tactics foreign actors might use to discredit the election, including ransomware attacks or falsely claiming to have hacked voter registration systems.

In September, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against the employees of a Russian television station who were involved in a scheme to influence American politics and it seized internet domain names that they said were used by Russian operatives to spread fake news.

The federal government moved quickly to publicly attribute the fake Pennsylvania ballot video to Russia the day after the video first appeared on X — a notably rapid turnaround for intelligence and law enforcement officials. And they warned they expect more such fakes in the coming days and weeks.

“Our adversaries know that misinformation and disinformation is cheap and effective,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, in an interview with NPR.

Russia and Iran are expected to seize on election fraud claims, however bogus, and create their own material to undermine the results, as a way of sowing chaos and scuttling democracy.

This year, law enforcement and intelligence officials are more aggressive in calling out foreign interference. The Obama administration was reticent to make public information about the full scope of Russia’s efforts favoring Trump until after the election.

The Department of Homeland Security’s cyber agency is taking the most complex threat environment they have ever faced into account when it comes to election security, according to a department official.

“If I lose — I’ll tell you what, it’s possible. Because they cheat. That’s the only way we’re gonna lose, because they cheat,” Trump said at a September rally in Michigan.

Donald Trump is still proclaiming he won the 2020 election even though courts and investigations found no evidence of fraud. He has already set the stage to reject the results should he lose again this year.

Source: Voting officials face ‘an uphill battle’ to fight election lies

A Russian propaganda operation in 2024: The case against voter fraud in the U.S., according to the video released by Linvill

Linvill traced the video back to a Russian propaganda operation, first identified by Clemson, that has also spread faked videos targeting Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in recent weeks.

“They’re fighting an uphill battle,” said Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which tracks election influence campaigns. They often feel like they are trying to put their hands in the dike before it explodes.

But the incident showed what has been clear for some time now: Online in 2024, the deck is stacked against voting officials, maybe even more so than in 2020. The phony video was viewed hundreds of thousands of times shortly after it was posted. A statement debunking it was shared only three hours after it was first shared.