Last month, Georgia’s State Election Board approved a controversial rule change requiring local election officials to hand count the number of ballots cast on Election Day, citing the alleged need to “enhance election integrity” and reduce “the opportunity for collusion to sabotage election results.” While the Fulton County Superior Court and Georgia’s Supreme Court have prevented the rule change from applying to the November election, damage has already been done. The movement to institute the rule will do precisely the opposite of the Board’s stated purpose, providing foreign adversaries and election deniers with a potentially tailor-made narrative to spread disinformation and undermine trust in U.S. elections.
The Risk of Foreign Influence in the U.S. Election
In 2020, foreign cyberattacks and influence operations attempted to disrupt the electoral process. Russian and Iranian-linked operations sought to inflame domestic political tensions and published lies about extensive ballot tampering, which manipulated some individuals, including U.S. citizens, who spread the falsehoods on fringe social media sites and right-wing message boards as evidence to back former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. Despite many efforts by independent researchers and government investigators, it remains difficult to quantify the full impact of foreign interference on the 2020 election. However, domestic partisan claims did result in the erosion of trust that foreign adversaries desired. Although U.S. election infrastructure, such as voting machines, remains highly secure, the proliferation of narratives about electoral fraud that were promoted by public figures and that incited the January 6 insurrection demonstrate how post-election discourse can have profound consequences for American democracy.
This year, the interplay of domestic political cleavages and foreign malign influence in the days after Election Day should be front and center on the U.S. security agenda. Already this election cycle, cyberattacks and mis- and disinformation campaigns, combined with the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence and a reduction in moderation efforts by online platforms, have threatened voters’ ability to access reliable election information. The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has repeatedly identified efforts by the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments to manipulate political and election-related information online. The latest assessment emphasized that foreign actors are likely to focus their efforts on undermining trust in the electoral process and results after Election Day, especially where the outcomes are close or contested.
Though foreign influence operations have had limited impact in the past, they are undoubtedly becoming more widespread and sophisticated. The IC believes the Russian efforts to undermine trust in the 2020 election by shaping opinions about candidates and undercutting trust in American democracy began as early as 2014 – meaning Russian State actors are preparing for the November election with a decade of groundwork and experience to draw on. Most insidiously, these foreign efforts tap into the preexisting domestic mis- and disinformation narratives at the heart of U.S. electoral and political tensions.
A Brewing Storm of Election Disputes
Even before the Election Board’s decision, Georgia was poised to be at the center of information interference and election integrity disputes that are likely to start the day after the election. It is exactly the type of close and contested election that the IC expects foreign States to target in earnest. Unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 vote in Georgia was fraudulent have continued to circulate and fueled the movement to make the hand count rule change. Reporting by The Guardian in September uncovered a group of Georgia election officials who support the 2020 fraud narrative and have been coordinating to preemptively cast doubt on the 2024 election results and enact rule changes supported by the election denial movement, such as making it easier for officials to refuse to certify election results. And in August, Microsoft published details of an Iranian influence operation fueling fake news sites, including a site purporting to be a local Georgia publication, called “Savannah Time.” The Georgia Election Board’s support of a hand-count rule created even more fertile ground for foreign and domestic actors to push disinformation by suggesting that the election was not secure in the first place.
The Hand-Counting Rule Adds to Voter Mistrust
In his Fulton County ruling, Judge McBurney wrote that the rule “introduces a new and substantive role” for thousands of poll workers without any training, requires ballots to be handled by many additional hands before they are securely transported to election officials, thereby creating opportunities for mistakes, and concluding that these issues do not “contribute to lessening the tension or boosting the confidence of the public for this election.”
The Georgia Supreme Court rejected an appeal in a separate but similar ruling on several new election rules, including the hand count rule. That hand counting weakens the chain of custody was also a key reason Georgia’s Republican secretary of state’s office asked counties not to implement a hand counting process in 2022.
The rulings do not end the risks surrounding the hand counting rule. Any additional news about these rule changes and the related legal battles so close to Election Day will likely cause confusion and be talking points used to undermine the results. Efforts to enact the rule in the first place may lead voters to conclude that the rule was necessary to protect election integrity, despite the fact that the 2020 U.S. election was heralded by Trump’s own officials as the most secure in American history. A massive statewide audit of paper ballots in Georgia in 2020 found no evidence of fraud or rigging, and conspiracy theorists that peddled lies about the election recanted those accusations under oath after the election.
Now, those seeking to undermine trust in Georgia’s elections could unfairly villainize the courts’ actions as evidence of nefarious activity, driving the inaccurate and increasingly widespread belief that Georgia’s elections are unreliable. Anyone who wishes to cast doubt on the Georgia election results can point to the blocking of the hand count rule as a reason why the election was not secure and therefore the results cannot be trusted or, more sinisterly, that it was part of a deliberate conspiracy to commit fraud. If the election in Georgia is close or disputed, this argument – and related mis- and disinformation narratives – are likely to surface in the days after the polls close.
Steps to Reduce Election Misinformation
Steps can and should be taken to prevent election misinformation from spreading during the critical post-election period. Social media companies and generative AI developers should prepare to rebut prominent misleading post-election narratives in Georgia, including concern about hand-counting ballots, with authoritative information from state and local election administrators. They can do so by proactively directing users to reliable sources such as official government election websites, providing basic information about when to expect election results to prepare users in case they encounter misleading claims about delayed results, and promptly enforcing their own rules about false election-related information. To help build public trust and minimize the risk that their interventions are viewed as putting their thumb on the scale, companies should alert users ahead of time about how they will respond to election mis- and disinformation. They should also improve communication among themselves so they can more quickly identify and act when that content or narrative spreads from one platform to another.
With less than two weeks until Election Day and millions of ballots already cast, the U.S. election is here. So too are confusion, conspiracies, and attacks on the democratic process. Georgia’s last-minute rule change only adds to the challenge. Building up resilience to a chaotic information environment will help protect against the greatest threat: being wrongly persuaded that U.S. elections are not secure, fair, and democratic.