Delayed Election Results Could Test Social Media Companies as Never Before
Experts say results won’t be on election night. That could lead to a misinformation nightmare.
Greetings all. This is Kartikay on the cyber team here to chat about election security in the pandemic era.
Election day 2020 is going to be like nothing the American republic has ever seen, and it’s time to set some realistic expectations about the months leading up to Nov. 3 and the chaos that may follow until inauguration day—particularly if social media platforms aren’t prepared.
First: Don’t expect results on election night.
The immediate gratification American voters have enjoyed for decades (other than Bush v. Gore in 2000) will likely come to an end in 2020. That’s the diagnosis of experts and academics like the University of Michigan’s J. Alex Halderman. Barring sweeping and unprecedented intervention by the Supreme Court, many of the 8,000 voting jurisdictions across the country will accept and count ballots in their own way and on their own schedule. Without a Covid-cure miracle, or a last-minute shift in election systems, postal ballots will slow down the tabulation process by days, maybe weeks.
That could be a good thing, despite President Trump’s frequent Twitter attacks on mail-in ballots. Earlier this year, even before the coronavirus commandeered 2020, I spoke with a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security who argued that states would benefit by doing away with the pressures of election night reporting. TV ratings might plummet, but it would put the U.S. in a better position to thwart cyber attackers’ plans to affect or discredit results, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Even President Trump advocated for paper ballots to combat foreign interference ahead of the 2018 midterms.