Time September 21/September 28, 2020now they get most of their information
from cable news channels,” says Moritz.
“Whatever the narrative is from the na-
tional level is how they’re driven to re-
ceive their information.”
The constant onslaught of misinforma-
tion about mail-in ballots led to a trend
this summer where users who said they
were Trump supporters posted videos of
themselves throwing their absentee or
mail-in ballot requests in the trash and
encouraged others to do the same. This
was especially frustrating for election offi-
cials in states that have long offered mail-
in voting, like Colorado, where counties
began using it for some elections in 1993.
“I can no longer listen to the rhetoric that
Colorado’s mail ballot system is at risk in
the upcoming general election,” Fremont
County clerk Justin Grantham, a Repub-
lican, wrote in an op-ed. “I feel it is my
duty to assure you that your right to vote
is protected and secured.”
According to an August WSJ/NBC poll,
just 11% of Trump supporters said they
planned to vote by mail, compared with
47% of supporters of Democratic nomi-
nee Joe Biden. State and local officials are
trying to explain to Republican voters that
mail-in ballots are safe and legitimate,
often contradicting the President’s words.
In one case, a mailer sent to GOP voters
in North Carolina by the Trump Victory
Fund featured Trump’s face and a partial
quote from one of his tweets asserting, in-
correctly, that voting absentee is secure,
while voting by mail is not. The mailer in-
cluded the part of Trump’s tweet declar-
ing that “absentee Ballots are fine” but
blurred out the rest of it, which read, “Not
so with Mail-Ins. Rigged Election!!! 20%
fraudulent ballots?” The confusion forced
Darryl Mitchell, chairman of the Johnston
County Republican Party, to post on Face-
book, reassuring voters that the mailer was
real. But in the comments section below,
voters insisted they’d vote in person.
A lot of the cAnArds and falsehoods
being spread about 2020 have targeted
Black and Latino communities. That was
true in 2016 as well: according to a Sen-
ate Intelligence Committee investigation
into Russia’s Internet Research Agency re-
leased last year, “no single group of Amer-
icans was targeted by IRA information op-
eratives more than African- Americans.”
Foreign operatives stoked anger over
police brutality and economic inequity,
often pretending to be Black Lives Mat-
ter activists.
These tactics are still in use today.
Far-right Republican Laura Loomer’s
“Twitter army” used messaging that was
“squarely targeting Black and Latino vot-
ers,” according to an analysis shared with
TIME by Win Black/Pa’lante, a group that
focuses on combatting disinformation tar-
geting these communities. Accounts sup-
porting Loomer, a congressional candi-
date in Florida, did so by seeding false
claims using the hashtags #JohnLewis,
#JimCrowJoe and #BlackLivesMatter.
Misinformation is “the next major bar-
rier to the right to vote for Black and La-
tino people. We see it in the same trajec-
tory as a poll tax or a literacy tax,” says
Andre Banks, a co-founder of Win Black/
Pa’lante. “There’s a sustained campaign
around the election now where you haveinformation on cyberthreats, is working
with the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity (DHS) and other U.S. agencies on a
“Misinformation Reporting Portal” where
election officials can flag suspected false
claims and get a quick response from
social- media platforms. “Perhaps the
biggest challenge that we face as a na-
tion going forward,” the group’s president,
John Gilligan, told lawmakers on Aug. 4,
“is how we address the impact of mis- and
disinformation on elections.”
Social-media companies have belat-
edly begun to address the problem, with
Twitter taking the most aggressive ac-
tions. On Aug. 23, after the President
tweeted multiple false claims about mail-
drop boxes, including that they would
make it possible for people to vote mul-
tiple times, Twitter obscured his tweet
and added a label saying that it had vio-
lated Twitter’s rules on “civic and election
integrity.” To read the presidential tweet,
users had to click on the message.
Facebook says it is labeling voting-
related posts so users are warned before
sharing potentially misleading informa-
tion. It also announced that it will block
new political ads the week before the
election, which critics say is too little,
too late. This comes after a scathing civil
rights audit of the company’s policies in
July. “Ironically, Facebook has no qualms
about... limiting misinformation about
COVID-19,” the report found, “but when
it comes to voting, Facebook has been far
too reluctant to adopt strong rules to limit
misinformation and voter suppression.”
Ultimately, whether Americans believe
November’s election to be free, fair and
valid is being challenged by one of the two
men on the ballot. Four years ago, Rus-
sia subverted American democracy with
a campaign to elect Donald Trump. This
year, the Kremlin is taking its cues from
him. On Sept. 3, DHS issued an intelli-
gence bulletin warning that Russia is once
again seeking to undermine faith in the
U.S. electoral process. Among its meth-
ods? “Amplifying criticisms” of “the in-
tegrity of expanded and universal vote-
by-mail, claiming ineligible voters could
receive ballots due to out-of-date voter
rolls, leaving a vast amount of ballots...
vulnerable to tampering.” Not much ques-
tion where the Kremlin came up with that.
—With reporting by Brian BenneTT,
mariah espada and aBBy Vesoulis •Politics
JUST 11% OF TRUMP
SUPPORTERS SAY THEY
PLAN TO VOTE BY MAIL,
COMPARED WITH 47%
OF BIDEN SUPPORTERS
all the bad actors—foreign agents, trolls,
all the way to the U.S. President at the
top— drowning out all of the attempts to
help people get the real information.”
Targeted misinformation campaigns
have proved effective. More than 35% of
registered voters say they are not confi-
dent the election will be fair, according to
an August Monmouth University poll. Re-
publicans say the problem is voter fraud;
Democrats say it’s voter suppression. And
while there are reasons to worry that every
American will not have access to the polls,
both concerns underscore the task that
election officials now face. “If the percep-
tion is there, then people believe that it’s
a fraudulent election,” Kim Wyman, the
Republican secretary of state in Washing-
ton, told TIME in June.
Officials are countering with the facts.
The National Association of Secretaries of
State launched a social- media campaign
with the hashtag #TrustedInfo2020 to
amplify credible sources of voting infor-
mation. The Center for Internet Security,
a nonprofit that helps governments share64