Trump, Harris campaign on economy, prepare for debate
With just over two months to go before Election Day in the United States, presidential nominees Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are campaigning on the economy and preparing for their first debate. VOA correspondent Scott Stearns looks at the race.
FILE - Nick Zaharias loads a test ballot into a vote-counting machine while testing machines before the New Hampshire primary in Derry, New Hampshire, Jan. 16, 2024.
US seeks to reassure voters that presidential election will be safe
washington —
Top U.S. election security officials are asking American voters to tune out the noise and reject what they describe as unfounded claims that the coming presidential election will be rigged.
Instead, in the first of a series of election security briefings planned in the run-up to November's election, they say U.S. voters should have confidence that when they go to the polls their votes will be counted accurately.
"Throughout the next few months, you are going to hear a lot of different things from different sources. The most important thing is to recognize the signal through the noise, the facts from the fiction," said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is responsible for election security.
FILE - Jen Easterly, director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, speaks at a meeting in Washington, Feb. 16, 2023.
"Our elections process, election infrastructure has never been more secure, and the election stakeholder community has never been stronger," Easterly said, briefing reporters Tuesday. "It's why I have confidence in the integrity of our elections and why the American people should, as well."
Easterly's effort to reassure voters comes a little over a month after the U.S. intelligence community issued its own warning that U.S. adversaries, led by Russia, Iran and China, are seeking to meddle with the November election.
But those efforts highlighted in the intelligence community warning are spearheaded by influence operations or disinformation campaigns designed to sow doubt about the U.S. election process and to help or hinder certain candidates.
In contrast, efforts by U.S. adversaries to attack or hack systems used to carry out the election, and tally votes, have so far been nonexistent.
"We have not seen any intent to interfere in the elections process," Cait Conley, CISA senior adviser, told reporters.
And while some of that could be explained by what officials describe as a steady stream of investments in election security infrastructure — including the hiring of more field offices and election security advisers — CISA officials are not taking the lack of malicious activity for granted.
"That is something that could change at any moment," Conley said. "When we look at this threat landscape for this election cycle, it truly is arguably the most complex yet."
CISA said other efforts to safeguard the upcoming presidential election include a variety of election security exercises, accuracy testing for voting machines, and enhanced security measures to protect election-related computer networks.
They also emphasize that none of the systems that record votes are connected to the internet and that 97% of U.S. voters will cast ballots in jurisdictions that have paper ballots as back-ups.
None of that, however, will stop countries such as Russia, Iran and China from trying to convince voters that things are going wrong.
Easterly said one of the biggest concerns is that U.S adversaries will portray minor hiccups as major scandals.
"It's almost inevitable that somewhere across the country someone will forget to bring the keys to unlock the polling location," she said. "Someone will unplug a printer to plug in a crockpot. A storm may cause a polling site to lose electricity."
Cybercriminals might even find a way to temporarily disable what officials describe as election-adjacent systems, including websites for state and local agencies that record and tally votes.
"We can absolutely expect that our foreign adversaries will remain a persistent threat to attempting to undermine American confidence in our democracy and our institutions and to sow partisan discord," she said. "It is up to all of us not to let our foreign adversaries be successful."
Easterly and Conley said the best way to avoid unnecessary panic is for American voters to rely on state and local election officials for information.
But if Americans rely on word-of-mouth social media accounts, it could cause trouble.
"It's a hard problem for social media companies," a senior U.S. intelligence official said at a recent briefing, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.
"The PRC [People's Republic of China] definitely uses influence actors on social media to try to at least stir discord in the United States," the official said. "So, I would expect that platform to be [used]."
And there is growing evidence that China may be ramping up its efforts.
Graphika, a social media analytics firm, issued a report Tuesday warning that a Chinese-linked disinformation operation known as "Spamoflage" has grown increasingly aggressive.
Graphika said it has identified more than a dozen accounts on platforms including X, formerly known as Twitter, and on TikTok "claiming to be U.S. citizens and/or U.S.-focused peace, human rights, and information integrity advocates frustrated by American politics and the West."
"These accounts have seeded and amplified content denigrating Democratic and Republican candidates, sowing doubt in the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral process, and spreading divisive narratives about sensitive social issues," the Graphika report said, though it added that few of the accounts had managed to gain much traction.
Graphika's conclusions seem to be consistent with earlier assessments by Meta, the social media company behind Facebook and Instagram, when it first identified the effort last year.
"Despite the very large number of accounts and platforms it used, Spamouflage consistently struggled to reach beyond its own [fake] echo chamber," Meta said at the time. "Only a few instances have been reported when Spamouflage content on Twitter and YouTube was amplified by real-world influencers."
