Attempts to intimidate voters, an exodus of poll workers fed up with harassment, and ongoing disinformation and misinformation campaigns threaten the integrity of the November election, officials with the state watchdog group Common Cause said Tuesday.
This year will mark the first presidential election since the “big lie,” Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomón said in a video call with reporters.
She was referring to efforts by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to downplay Trump’s 2020 re-election defeat by spreading a series of unfounded conspiracy theories and encouraging their supporters to prevent Congress from certifying the results on January 6, 2021.
Common Cause is a nonpartisan organization, and Solomón and other speakers did not mention Trump, who is again the Republican presidential nominee, by name.
However, Solomón said the integrity of the country’s elections had been damaged by the experiences of 2020, with many experienced election officials choosing to quit the profession rather than face threats and harassment from supporters of electoral conspiracies.
“We still live with the legacy of those lies,” she said. “They have undermined the faith of many Americans in our elections and fueled anger and heated rhetoric… These lies have also led to threats and harassment of election officials, who have experienced massive turnover in their ranks.”
In addition to these challenges, poll workers and voters must also grapple with this cycle by improving generative artificial intelligence tools that make spreading disinformation easier than ever, experts at Common Cause say.
And state laws, such as a measure to eliminate automatic delivery of mail-in ballots that took effect in Florida after the 2022 election, threatened further confusion and disenfranchisement, it said.
To counter these threats to electoral integrity, the group is preparing for awareness-raising campaigns during the election season.
Threat of violence
Cases of actual political violence remain sporadic, said Suzanne Almeida, director of state operations for Common Cause, who also leads the group’s work against political violence.
But threats, violent comments, doxing and other harassment continue, Almeida said.
This has impacted poll workers, with a recent study A study by the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice found that 38% of poll workers had experienced threats and more than half of local election officials feared for their safety.
While surveys, including a recent study by the University of California-Davis studyshowed that voters of both parties rejected political violence. “Candidates with big platforms” used these to boost voter turnout, Almeida said.
“We are seeing that the normalization of hate, violent rhetoric, threats of violence and harassment is a viable political strategy,” she said.
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a message seeking comment Tuesday.
AI and misinformation
According to Ishan Mehta, program director for media and democracy at Common Cause, deliberate attempts to misinform voters and the inadvertent spread of misinformation remain a growing problem.
The expansion and improvement of generative artificial intelligence makes it easier to create and distribute fraudulent campaign content.
“The ubiquity of these tools means that you no longer have to be a computer expert to spread misinformation that would convince a large portion of the population, more than half,” Mehta said.
Social media platforms, which had stepped up their efforts to combat misinformation after January 6, have now backtracked on pursuing such information, he said.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, tweeted a doctored video of likely Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris over the weekend. Musk, who supports Trump, bought the platform in 2022. He has 192 million followers.
Florida Law
Amy Keith, executive director of Common Cause Florida, said recent changes to the state’s election law would cause confusion and deprive some voters of their ballots.
More than 1.9 million Floridians who received a mail-in ballot in 2022 will not receive one this election cycle, she said. The state passed a law after that election requiring voters to submit novel applications for mail-in ballots with additional identification.
“While some of those 1.9 million people may not want to vote by mail this year, we know that thousands and thousands of voters in Florida are probably expecting a mail-in ballot to land in their mailbox,” she said. “And that’s not going to happen.”
In the run-up to the state’s Aug. 20 primary, Common Cause and allied groups are “really working to get the message across to voters” that they must request a mail-in ballot if they want to vote by mail, and that they can vote in person even if they requested a mail-in ballot, Keith said.
Deploying survey monitors
Although Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, did not expect widespread violence on Election Day, he did expect cases of political violence or intimidation.
The group will send “hundreds of poll watchers” across the state to record such incidents. The watchers will also be trained in de-escalation, he said.
Hensley-Robin began his remarks by acknowledging the “tragic events” of Trump’s assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, but said the “isolated incident” would not deter voters from turning out.
He also expected that some would file “meritless” lawsuits to “disenfranchise voters and undermine public confidence in the election.” But he predicted that those lawsuits would be quickly dismissed.
Trump’s campaign lost numerous lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election.
Addressing voters
Solomón said Common Cause will remind voters to be wary of misinformation and disinformation, especially from artificial intelligence, and that Election Day will likely end without a clear winner in the presidential race, a situation that has fueled conspiracy theories about voter fraud.
“This is not a sign that something is wrong,” she said.
The group will also stay in touch with poll workers to understand their needs and offer assistance, she said.
She added that democracy must be proactive.
“I think that the 2020 election created a false narrative that democracy endured and did what it was supposed to do,” she said. “And one of the things I like to remind people is that democracy did not endure. We made it endure.”
