HOMEGROWN
THRE AT
Misinformation about voting has eroded Americans’ faith in a fair election
BY VERA BERGENGRUEN AND LISSANDRA VILLAPoliticsAfter months of wAtching commenters flood
his office’s social-media posts with voting myths and
fielding calls about election conspiracies from constitu-
ents, Brian Corley finally got fed up. In July, the super-
visor of elections in Florida’s Pasco County decided to
shut down his office’s Facebook and Twitter accounts
to stop false claims from spreading. “I just got tired of
the misinformation and the partisan bickering back and
forth,” says Corley, a Republican with 13 years on the
job. “I saw no value in it as an election administrator.”
If 2016 showed how foreign operatives were exploit-
ing social media to influence the U.S. election, the lesson
of 2020 is already clear and even more worrisome: the
greatest threat to a credible vote is homegrown. From
the White House on down, Americans have taken a page
from the Kremlin’s playbook by weaponizing misinfor-
mation online to advance their political goals. Election
officials like Corley are struggling to break through an
avalanche of falsehoods about mail-in ballots, doubts
about the integrity of voting systems and skepticism
about the validity of the results.
No one has done more to sow suspicion or spread
lies than President Donald Trump, whose aggressive
attacks on mail-in voting and false allegations of wide-
spread voter fraud have capitalized on fear and uncer-
tainty about holding a presidential election in the midst
of the COVID-19 pandemic. On television, at rallies
and on Twitter, Trump has falsely claimed that mail-
in ballots “lead to massive corruption and fraud,” that
foreign powers will “forge ballots” and that the “only
way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is
rigged.” He has falsely implied that ballots are being sent
to undocumented immigrants in California and even
suggested delaying the election, which he has no au-
thority to do, until Americans can safely vote in person.
None of this is new, exactly. As a candidate in 2016,
Trump pushed baseless claims of voter fraud, including
that hordes of dead people and noncitizens would vote
for Democrats. Now, with the weight of the most pow-
erful office in the world, his allegations are being par-
roted by federal and state officials, GOP activists, local
campaigns, small-town radio shows and national media
outlets. Vice President Mike Pence has backed up his un-
founded claims, and Attorney General William Barr has
alleged that mail voting “opens the floodgates to fraud.”
Election administrators from both parties, as well as
nonpartisan officials in Trump’s own government, in-
sist voting by mail is safe. The FBI says it has found no
evidence of coordinated fraud with mail-in ballots and
emphasized such a scenario would be very unlikely. “It
would be extraordinarily difficult to change a federal
election outcome through this type of fraud alone,” a
senior FBI official told reporters in an Aug. 26 briefing.
But a claim doesn’t have to be true to affect an elec-
tion. U.S. national- security agencies and social-media
companies, which spent the past four years working to
weed out false claims perpetuated by foreign adversar-
ies, say the domestic disinformation this year presents
a new challenge. Because of the constitutional right to
free speech, it can be nearly impossible to police bad-
faith claims, whether the speaker is an Internet troll or
the Commander in Chief.
The result threatens not only the perceived legiti-
macy of this election but also Americans’ broader faith
in U.S. democracy. “We have seen already that the Pres-
ident’s rhetoric is affecting the confidence that voters
have in vote-by-mail, particularly, and also in elections
in general,” Sylvia Albert, director of voting and electionsPHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID GUTTENFELDER FOR TIME