than 100 volunteers worked four-hour shifts to
monitor false claims coming out of the state’s
primary election in March. The most frequent
conspiracy theory shared that night claimed
that staffing shortages at polling locations were
deliberate, Bowers noted.
“Texas is kind of the playbook for things to
come,” said Emma Steiner, a disinformation
analyst for the group. “My major concern is
that local issues, like with these staff or ballot
shortages, will be amplified by influencers or
partisan actors with a national platform as signs
of malign interference in elections; it’s a pretty
recognized pattern from 2020.”
On Election Day 2020, Pennsylvania was a hotbed
for false claims about voting machine outages
and discarded votes that were shared across
conservative news websites and social media.
It’s a problem that many counties in the
state remain ill-equipped to handle, said Al
Schmidt, who served as the lone Republican on
Philadelphia’s election board during the 2020
presidential contest. He drew national attention
for refuting Trump’s false claims of mass voter
fraud. He resigned from his post in January and
now runs a government watchdog group that
also educates Pennsylvania voters about the
election process.
“Elections are all consuming and few have the
time to monitor and counter misinformation,”
Schmidt said. “A lot of them don’t have the
resources to do this, or the in-house capacity to
do this by themselves — you’re hit at the time
you’re most busy.”
Election officials in Ohio’s Hamilton County hope
they are better prepared this year.