How election workers are fighting back against bad actors trying to undermine the process

From rampant disinformation, foreign adversaries trying to sew chaos and ballot boxes set ablaze, there are many bad actors trying to undermine our elections process. There’s also an army of non-partisan election officials who are collecting ballots and pushing back, confident that this election, like the last, will be secure. William Brangham discussed more with Juliette Kayyem.
Amna Nawaz:
Officials across the country are working overtime to ensure Election Day is a success, and the stakes are high.
William Brangham has a closer look at the threats causing concern — William.
William Brangham:
Thanks, Amna.
From rampant disinformation, foreign adversaries trying to sow chaos, ballot boxes set ablaze, there are many bad actors trying to undermine our elections process. But there’s also an army of nonpartisan elections officials who are collecting ballots and pushing back, confident that this election, like the last, will be secure.
For a closer look at what we need to know in advance of Tuesday, we are joined again by Juliette Kayyem. She’s a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and faculty chair of the Homeland Security Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Juliette, so good to have you back on the program.
You have been advising elections administrators around the country in the lead-up to Tuesday. What is the mood like amongst them right now?
Juliette Kayyem, Former U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary: It is nervous, but also no surprises.
In other words, everyone has been anticipating what we’re now seeing going on, which is both a coordinated and ad hoc sort of attack on how we vote, where we vote, what we understand to be the truth in the information space.
And so this is not a surprise to them, but let’s just be honest. The system wasn’t built for this, so they’re adapting and pivoting in real time.
William Brangham:
Let’s talk about some of those different threats. One of them has been physical attacks.
Juliette Kayyem:
Right.
William Brangham:
We saw these ballot boxes lit on fire in the Pacific Northwest. We saw a man in Arizona shoot up a DNC office, again, not an elections office, but how are elections officials preparing for those kinds of physical so-called kinetic attacks?
Juliette Kayyem:
So that’s their biggest concern, because, of course, it is the get-out-the-vote next Tuesday which has to be protected. And you have lots of volunteers, lots of young people, lots of old people.
And their physical safety is the most important. In most instances, private security is also being hired to buttress public safety security. Preventative measures, everything from lighting and videos to sort of make sure that there’s eyes and ears everywhere are occurring. And so there’s both defense in terms of essentially locking down, to the extent that you can, and then preparing if there are attacks what you would do.
In my opinion, it is less likely that any individual place is going to have a physical attack. There’s going to be lots of hoaxes, lots of disinformation. The goal is to disrupt the get-out-the-vote. So just think about what 10 bomb threat scammers could do in urban area in a swing state.
And so there’s lots of practicing about, essentially, how do you move from one building to another out into the street? You just got to keep focusing on get-out-the-vote. And that’s what a lot of the training and practicing is doing right now.
William Brangham:
I mean, what a world we live in.
Juliette Kayyem:
I know.
William Brangham:
I mean, apart from the — this physical threat, there’s also this concurrent information war attack against the voting system.
The former president and many of his allies have continued for four years to say that the last election was stolen and that this one currently is also being cheated upon and stolen.
We also know that polls show that this message has penetrated to Republicans, where some polls show half, some show a majority of Republicans believe there will be cheating and fraud. How on earth do we defend against that?
Juliette Kayyem:
So the first thing is just to say, factually, there is simply no evidence of rampant sort of institutionalized voter fraud. You are going to see cases here or there of which people are arrested or there are mistakes made.
When millions of people are voting, that is going to happen. So it’s just worth the sort of the groundwork is, we have as a country the most safe and fair elections in almost any democracy at this stage, given how bifurcated it is.
I mean, you have so many different polling places. So that’s the first thing. The second is the information pushback that’s going on now against a concerted both foreign and domestic campaign to undermine the validity of this election, not just to disrupt the vote on Tuesday, lies about place and time and whether you’re authorized to vote, but also to create a narrative that, should Donald Trump lose in the election, he will create a narrative that he didn’t lose fairly, that the votes were stolen from him.
That narrative, a lot of — there’s a lot of people interested in promoting that narrative, including the Russians, including Elon Musk, who owns Twitter and X and who has, we know, promoting falsities about the vote.
The best thing one can do — and there’s two things. One is, citizens need to get smart about their information intake, including people who think they are sophisticated inhalers of intelligence. We all tend to get whipped up at the random person who says something. We need to sort — we need to validate it.
The other is, you’re starting to see public and private entities push back on the lies early on. I have never seen, for example, the United States government give attribution to the Russians for a lot of lies that they’re sort of pushing in social media about fake votes and about voting places, losing ballots.
The United States is going to name and shame to the extent it can as well.
William Brangham:
I mentioned at the beginning that elections officials say, look, 2020 was the safest, most secure election we have ever had. And they think that they’re going to be the same or better this year. Do you share that confidence?
Juliette Kayyem:
Yes, I do.
The thing that I can’t sort of qualify or quantify right now is how many people are willing to break federal law — just a reminder, this is breaking federal law — to disrupt the vote? And if they’re willing to do that, then you can see disruptions that we hadn’t imagined in the past.
William Brangham:
All right, that is Juliette Kayyem of the Harvard Kennedy School.
Always great to see you. Thank you so much for being here.
Juliette Kayyem:
Thank you for having me.