Attempts to mislead the public about voting and elections remain a top concern for state election officials as they delve into preparations for the 2024 election.

Misinformation and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence tools to create false and misleading content were cited in interviews with several secretaries of state recently meeting for their national conference. Other major concerns were staffing levels and the loss of experienced leaders who oversaw elections at the local level. The officials had gathered in Washington for the National’s annual summer conference

Association Assn.

of secretaries of state.

The cliché here is true, said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat. You hope for the best, but plan for the worst. So we were prepared for the worst, which is that multiple communication channels will be filled with false and misleading information.

State election officials in Michigan and Colorado said they were particularly concerned about the rise of AI and the implications of its misuse by foreign adversaries seeking to interfere in US elections. They pointed to altered videos, known as deepfakes, that rely on facial recognition and AI to make it look like real people are saying things they never said.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said she convened a task force in her office to play out potential risks following the 2020 presidential election marred by false claims and attacks on votes. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said state and federal regulations requiring disclosure of AI-generated content are needed, along with boosting public awareness.

We can’t necessarily put the genie back in the bottle, but we can teach citizens how to receive that information, said Benson, a Democrat. And it gets much easier when there are disclaimers next to it that say, hey, this is fake.

Some state election officials said they wouldn’t be deterred by a recent court order from a Louisiana federal judge that limited federal agencies from contacting social media companies about content deemed false or misleading, with a few exceptions. On Friday, an appeals court temporarily suspended the order.

The order doesn’t apply to state officials, so I’ll keep talking to whoever I want to talk to, said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. If you know someone is lying out there and it’s hurting the voters they’re literally telling the voters the wrong day or the wrong places to vote they’re literally giving them bad information on purpose you should be able to stop that because that’s hindering the voters , However? to vote.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and others pointed to several ways to combat disinformation without communicating with social media companies. LaRose, a Republican, cited an instance where his staff posted a social media post that spread misinformation, falsely labeled it, and reposted it while checking with local news to make sure they knew it was original message was not true.

We’ve been working to actively combat false information, but the way we do it is by spreading large amounts of truth, LaRose said.

West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, praised the federal court’s ruling and said he was more concerned about the federal government being the one spreading false information. He said he supports efforts by House Republicans to investigate federal agencies for their activities ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

I think that’s the big story and it far outweighs all the other stuff we talked about here at this conference related to cybersecurity and, you know, credible sources and so forth, Warner said. The federal government shouldn’t be there telling Americans what they can and can’t hear, see, believe, Google, things like that. So hopefully we get it right.

Chris Krebs, the former director of the US Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency during the Trump administration, has defended his agency’s work in 2020. In a social media post following the court order, Krebs said his agency only connected state and local election officials with social media companies and did not filter or review any content.

Officials in Pennsylvania and Kentucky both called staffing a concern. In Pennsylvania, there has been significant attrition among those overseeing local elections, driven largely by retirements and increased stress. Al Schmidt, a Republican appointed as Pennsylvania’s chief election official, said the risks are high and the margin of error small.

The most dangerous thing is when you lose experienced election workers, you lose your institutional memory, you lose all that experience, and it’s replaced by people less experienced who are more likely to make a mistake and make a mistake in an environment where every mistake is seen as intentional or evil, he said.

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day conference was the first since several Republicans announced plans earlier this year to abandon a bipartisan effort aimed at improving the accuracy of voter rolls and identifying fraud, sparking consternation among their Democratic counterparts.

The decisions were made when the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC, was the target of conspiracy theories about its funding and purpose. Republicans cited other reasons for their departure and have been working on an alternative data-sharing system between individual states.

Several Democratic officials said they were not interested in any alternative to the ERIC system, which still includes some Republican-led states. They expressed the hope that states with large populations, such as California and New York, which are not currently part of ERIC, will join.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, said he is exploring his state’s options. A court order requires the state to participate in ERIC, Adams said, but several surrounding states and Florida, where many of its residents are retiring, are leaving or not participating.

Even if ERIC were hunky-dory, I’d still have to find ways to get information from more than 30 states that aren’t in ERIC, Adams said.

The conference largely avoided controversial topics during panel discussions, focusing instead on sharing best practices. Several officials said partisan divisions are being sidelined so they can work together to improve elections.

Warner said a Michigan official approached him to talk about efforts in West Virginia to improve voting among active-duty military personnel, and Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said he plans to talk to his staff about plans to help hearing-impaired voters after learning of Minnesota’s efforts.

There’s so much more we agree on than we disagree on, said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat. And at the end of the day, if we’re all a bunch of thieves, stealing ideas from each other and it’s like that’s a really cool program, I want to do that in my state.

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