National
CNN: Election officials are hustling to fight misinformation in real time as early voting begins
Sara Murray, Holmes Lybrand, and Marshall Cohen of CNN report on election officials’ efforts to combat misinformation.
The election misinformation machine is already ramping up in critical battleground states as early voting gets underway, and election officials are hustling to combat falsehoods in real time.
Conservatives have been sharing uncorroborated instances of machines flipping votes, claims of widespread fraud in mail ballots and suggestions that election officials are subverting the process if it takes multiple days to count ballots. The claims are ricocheting around social media as voters hit the polls. They mirror claims that former President Donald Trump and his allies spread around the 2020 election as they tried to head off Trump’s loss to now-President Joe Biden.
State and local election officials, however, are also preparing for a deluge of false and misleading claims, and are actively trying to address issues before they go far.
“Our humble ask is that before people swallow whole what they see in their social media feed, they at least verify it against a trusted source,” Minnesota Secretary of State and president of the National Association of Secretaries of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told reporters this week.