Can fake posts in social media influence your vote in Illinois’ 2020 elections?
Information technology staff at the Illinois State Board of Elections noticed something unusual on July 12, 2016. Activity on the state online voter application website had spiked dramatically without explanation.
Someone was trying to get the passwords of staff who had access to the voter registration system. Two years later, the U.S. Justice Department handed down indictments of Russian hackers, the source of the 2016 breach.
“That really alerted us to the need for heightened security of the database that we maintain of voter registration information statewide,” said Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the state election authority. “It’s a whole different universe now.”
Illinois spent millions after 2016 on the Cyber Navigator program, an effort to boost security spending and training for the state’s 108 election authorities. Local county clerks say they’ve been able to take steps once unaffordable, thanks to the program.
It was one reason elections in 2018 went smoothly, Dietrich said.
“It’s a breath of fresh air,” said St. Clair County Clerk Thomas Holbrook.
One thing the enhanced security can’t do: protect state election authorities from mistakes of their own making, like the three revealed last month.
Because of a coding error, the secretary of state’s office wrongly registered to vote 574 people who identified as non-U.S. citizens. Another data error resulted in the incorrect cancellation of former inmates’ voting privileges. The office also forwarded voter registration information for thousands of 16-year-olds to the elections board.
Republican lawmakers berated the office. State Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, said the errors “wounded the integrity of voter registration here in Illinois.” The secretary of state’s IT director, Jeff Clines, said the agency is reviewing what caused the mistakes and how to avoid them.
But disinformation on social media remains the larger threat, and there’s no playbook for beating it, Dietrich said. Thirty-nine percent of voters ages 18 to 24 get their news on social media, compared to 18% of voters over 24, according to a Knight Foundation study. Most of those consumers in both age groups got their news from Facebook.
“We’re optimistic 2020 will go the same way (as 2018),” Dietrich said, “but now we do have this heightened threat of interference through social media.”
Election security since 2016
After the 2016 breach, Illinois notified 76,000 voters that their personal information such as names and dates of birth may have been accessed, though the hackers didn’t succeed in changing or deleting any information, according to the state elections board.
In response to the breach, Illinois created the Cyber Navigator program, which received a $13.2 million grant from the federal government in 2018 to assist local authorities with cyber security projects. The state added another $1 million.
Nine program staffers throughout the state provide training on how hackers can get into a system. Email or text phishing, a message that tricks the reader into providing information or clicking a link, is one of the most common methods hackers use. Cyber Navigator staffers also conduct risk assessments of the clerk’s offices to identify hardware or software weaknesses.
In rural Hardin County on the border with Kentucky, the county clerk’s office was able to hire an IT company to provide security and updated hardware.
“The state board paid for it. We can’t afford to have an IT person on staff,” said County Clerk Jill Cowsert, who has served in the post since 2013. “We’ve never be able to do anything like this. We didn’t have the funding.”
Even counties with a richer tax base, such as St. Clair County, needed assistance to buy new equipment and software.
“We couldn’t afford them,” Holbrook said. “It filled a huge void where we needed help.”
Especially with these measures in place, the risk of hacking into a vote tabulator or a touch screen voting machine is “extremely remote,” Dietrich said.
In Madison County, like in other counties, none of the machines are connected to the internet or phone lines and a paper ballot backs up every vote, said County Clerk Debbie Ming-Mendoza. Electronic ballots files are stored on a standalone server accessible only to authorized personnel, and ballots are printed in-house.
Heightened security means “the potential for return on investment is a lot better through social media than a cyber attack” for malicious actors from abroad, Dietrich said.
Disinformation remains a threat
As the 2020 elections approach, officials say security is significantly better, but that disinformation on social media remains a more elusive target.
While cyber security specialists field hacking attempts around the clock, there’s no way for the Illinois State Board of Elections to prevent foreign actors — or their autonomous programs — from targeting Illinoisans with propaganda on Facebook or Twitter. Their only option is to remove malicious posts after the fact and educate the public.
“If a Russian bot is putting out Facebook posts saying candidate X is a fraud, there’s not much we can do about that because it could be a legitimate Facebook user in Illinois,” Dietrich said. “What we can do is encourage people that if you don’t trust the source of something you see on social media, check it out and don’t share it.”
In one 2016 instance, a Twitter and Facebook post suggested it was possible to vote for Hillary Clinton by texting “HILLARY” to a number.
Lookalike election websites and social media profiles with with false information have popped up in Illinois. In one case, it took weeks for Facebook to take down a page that imitated Chicago’s elections board. The page attempted to suppress voting by sharing incorrect information about voting dates and places, Board of Elections spokesman James Allen told Mother Jones magazine.
Trey Grayson, former head of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said disinformation is a problem nationwide, especially in a presidential election year.
“You have a lot of infrequent or first-time voters,” Grayson said. “It’s a time when people are more vulnerable. ... Especially right now in a primary season, there can be a lot of confusion.”
The US has ‘come a long, long way’
But the country has “come a long, long way” since 2016, he added. Awareness among voters has increased as have the efforts of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. Fifty-three percent of voters over 24 said they are skeptical of news they see on social media, while 45% of those younger than 24 said the same, according to the Knight Foundation study.
False content generated locally is also a threat, said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
“There’s a real danger that state and local party actors will deploy disinformation, taking advantage of the pervasive influence of social media to influence voters,” Barrett wrote in an email to the BND.
This kind of confusion is exhausting for voters. More than half who responded to the Knight Foundation study said it’s difficult to be well-informed because they have to sort through lots of information to find out what’s true.
The state plans to help voters learn about how to spot disinformation through a television and radio advertising campaign. The elections board also has connections to employees at Facebook and Twitter who can remove misleading content.
But Barrett says there’s no “systematic” way to track how much disinformation influences voters. All officials can do is “correct the record.” On election night, the state will staff a “war room” connected to the Department of Homeland Security to keep an eye on social media disinformation attempts.
Social media companies will also have to step up their efforts to combat disinformation, Grayson said.
“It’s in their best interest because if I don’t trust those sites, I’m not going to want to be getting on them as much,” he said. “The viability of their brands and their sites is a strong incentive to work with the government and officials.”
Overall, however, the country has “come a long, long way” since 2016, Grayson said. Awareness among voters has increased as have the efforts of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
“Compared to four years ago, everybody’s more on guard for this,” Grayson said. “We were caught flat-footed (in 2016).”
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
