Page 38 - FCW, September/October 2020

Election Security
“All of these legally required mailings are at risk if the post office is not able to process mail effectively or experiences delays.”
— Amber McReynolds, National Vote at Home Institute
which makes it a target for threat actors to exploit.”
Chief among those culprits is President Donald Trump, who has waged a relentless and evidence-free campaign to undermine confidence in mail-in ballots. Meanwhile, public surveys continue to show that voting preferences break down along political lines. The attacks put added stress on election administrators at a time when they’re trying to facilitate an election in which as many as 70% of voters could end up sending their ballots through the mail.
“Election officials are concerned about funding, concerned about what elections look like without it, and frankly,...they say to me they don’t have time for politics. They need to get the job done, and they need the resources to do it,” said Benjamin Hovland, a commissioner on the Election Assistance Commission, in response to a tweet by Trump saying the election should be delayed because of the increase in mail-in voting.
Shortly after Trump installed Republican fundraiser Louis DeJoy as postmaster general at USPS, DeJoy instituted changes that have slowed mail delivery. Democrats and some election observers have argued that the effect is intentional and designed
to overwhelm USPS when it begins processing a massive increase in mail- in ballots. That slowdown could also have a negative impact on other aspects of election administration.
“Federal and state laws have legal mandates with regard [to] sending voter registration information, ballot issue notices, election information, poll worker appointment letters, polling place notification cards, signature cards, address update notifications and other required mailings,” McReynolds said. “All of these legally required mailings are at risk if the post office is not able to process mail effectively or experiences delays.”
However, officials said that despite the changes, USPS “has ample capacity to adjust our nationwide processing and delivery network to meet projected election and political mail volume.”
In terms of disinformation, experts’ biggest concern is the inevitable delay in election results that will occur with the expansion of mail-in voting and the potential for bad actors to exploit uncertainty in the immediate aftermath of the election to cast doubt on the results. In most cases, processing mail ballots is a slow, laborious process. Voter signatures and other components must be verified and correctly sorted, often manually. Inexperience among
voters about the steps they must follow and delays in mail delivery could lead to significant confusion about whether certain ballots should be accepted or not.
The end result is a situation ripe for sowing confusion and discord. Clint Watts, a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, listed “viral mail-in ballot conspiracies” as the top disinformation threat facing the 2020 election.
“A false or manipulated video alleging voter fraud by mail could easily spread virally across the social media ecosystem, fueling widespread allegations of election rigging so extreme that it touches off protests, riots, armed standoffs or even violence,” Watts wrote in a July 30 blog post.
One potential solution is trans- parency. Judd Choate, Colorado’s direc- tor of elections, told the Bipartisan Pol- icy Center that being completely open about the way jurisdictions process and count mail-in ballots could serve as a counterweight to many false or mislead- ing claims.
“Let watchers, parties and press see everything you do,” he said. “Let them follow around ballot pickup teams, watch (and even challenge) the signature verification process, and observe adjudication and tabulation.” n
38 September/October 2020 FCW.COM
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