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Issue is new focus for local authorities

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Pandemic was turning point

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U.S. election compelling local action

By Carey L. Biron

WASHINGTON, Sept 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) -

R unning U.S. elections has always been a complicated job for

local officials, requiring the corralling of hundreds of

volunteers, staying on top of ever-changing legal requirements,

and now also combating misinformation and disinformation.

Running elections "has become one of the most high-profile

responsibilities that county government does," said Jennifer

Liewer, deputy elections director for communications for

Maricopa County in Arizona.

Maricopa, one of the country's most populous voting

jurisdictions, has been a hotbed of electoral scrutiny in recent

years, weathering 50 lawsuits since the contested 2020 election,

Liewer said.

"There have been a lot of allegations, false information and

narratives that aren't factually accurate that we have had to

combat," she said.

For Maricopa County, this has meant new staff, extensive

fact-checking efforts, online cameras in tabulation centres -

even an "official ballot" mascot that attends local professional

basketball games.

"Our office has been working toward improving and

communicating in a manner that we haven't done before," Liewer

said. "That's probably being seen around the country."

Such work is part of a deeper trend that has emerged since

the pandemic, with local officials increasingly forced to

address false information about public health, migration, and

urban planning strategies.

False information has not only changed every aspect of

election administration, but local officials often bear the

brunt of it given their visibility in their communities, said

Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of

State Election Directors.

"False information is one of the greatest challenges going

into November," she said, referring to the U.S. national

elections on Nov. 5.

"That is the thing that keeps a lot of us up at night,

because you can't predict the narrative that will take off."

TRUSTED MESSENGERS

Across the globe, local officials are a key, untapped

resource in addressing rising false information, said Paul

Costello, a senior manager with the German Marshall Fund's

cities programme.

Previously, cities did not tend to address false information

as a topic itself, said Costello, who in recent months has been

talking with local officials for a new disinformation response

"playbook", released last week.

"I had an increasing number of city officials coming to me

and saying, 'What can we do?'" said Ika Trijsburg, a researcher

with the Melbourne Centre for Cities in Australia, which led on

the playbook's development. Disinformation, she said, was

blocking policymaking and even prompting threats.

In the British capital London, for instance, policy

discussion over an ultra-low emission traffic zone last year

sparked a wave of disinformation over migration, diversity and

other issues.

In the Australian city of Onkaparinga, a proposed climate

emergency declaration fanned social media outrage, protests and

eventually the evacuation of local officials.

At the local level, false information tends to deal with

public health, sustainability, migration or sexual diversity,

Trijsburg said.

But elections can affect all of these areas, Costello

warned. "It's an opportunity for disinformation actors to

supercharge what's happening and to get a lot more traction,"

she said.

While cities do not have the intelligence operations or

other tools available to national governments to fight back,

local officials see the impacts more closely and have unique

access to organisations such as schools or sports clubs that can

be used to counter false information.

Increasingly, that work also takes place online.

In 2021, San Jose in California partnered with local online

influencers to address false information regarding vaccinations,

masks and other urgent pandemic concerns - particularly among

groups that had long distrusted local government.

"We had to rebuild trust simultaneously as we asked these

groups to transact on very serious action," recalled Andy

Lutzky, former communications chief for the city.

For months, nearly 50 local "trusted messengers" created

hundreds of social media posts in multiple languages, work that

Lutzky said helped drive higher vaccination rates, particularly

among marginalized communities.

Lutzky now works with Xomad, the company that organized that

work.

The firm started focusing on such public campaigns in 2019

and has since worked with numerous cities, as well as more than

16 state governments in the past year alone, said the company's

founder and CEO, Rob Perry.

"My vision for cities around the world in the future is that

each will have their trusted army of local messengers," he said.

Sarina Alavi, a 25-year-old psychology PhD student in New

York, worked with Xomad on a state campaign around substance use

disorder, an issue she said was rife with false information

online.

"It can be truly infuriating, especially when individuals

are posing as experts without the proper licensure or

certifications," she said.

Alavi's posts targeted false information on, for instance,

how easy it is to ascertain the presence of a dangerous drug -

"you can never really tell when a substance is laced and deadly

#CanYouTell?" - and on the number of teens and adults with

substance use disorder.

Her posts received more than 20,000 views, said Alavi, who

is continuing to engage on similar projects.

This is "the future of government communications," said

Xomad's Perry.

"We're three to four years away from pretty much every state

and many cities having a line item" for such work.

'BUCK STOPS WITH COUNTY CLERKS'

Some local officials are using the current election season

to test new tools to combat false information.

In June, a fake video purported to show Utah Governor

Spencer Cox admitting to fraudulently collecting ballot

signatures, leading Utah County Commissioner Amelia Powers

Gardner to release a public warning.

She also brought together academics and a local company to

test out a "digital identity" programme aimed at helping

candidates combat AI-created "deepfake" videos or audio

recordings.

"For a long time the deepfake-generation platforms weren't

convincing enough to dupe anyone. We're getting to the point now

where they're starting to cross that threshold, particularly for

audio deepfakes," said Brandon Amacher, director of the Emerging

Tech Policy Lab at Utah Valley University, which is involved in

the project.

Several campaigns are currently in talks with project

organizers to use the verification programme, which will run

through January.

"We're starting to really see the potential dangers of

this," he said.

"The buck stops with county clerks and commissioners on

election security - that's their primary concern."

(Reporting by Carey Biron; Editing by Jon Hemming. The Thomson

Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters.

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