The America PAC Election Integrity Community: Sowing Misinformation and Discriminating Opposals to Elections after Trump’s Insurrection

Barrett says that the America PAC’s Election Integrity Community group augments the work of other election-denying groups, like former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. “This is a parallel anti-election, anti-democracy campaign designed to sow confusion and lay the groundwork for baseless objections to elections after Election Day. This is going on all across the country, and it’s extremely dangerous,” says Barrett. The results of it are going to be seen immediately when the polls close on November 5th.

In January 2021, they banned Trump for inciting violence during the Capitol insurrection. Since taking over it has been renamed X and Musk has fired people who worked to keep the platform clean. X fired most of its elections integrity team last year. After the news broke, Musk posted on X, saying, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

Earlier in October, Musk appeared at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he repeated false claims that Democrats would allow undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, and encouraged Trump’s supporters to vote.

In practice, it is a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, alleging everything from unauthorized immigrants voting to misspelled candidate names on ballots. The Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University has written a report on the impact of social media on political violence.

For several months, Musk has shared election conspiracy theories on his platform in order to undermine faith in the outcome of the vote. Last week, the political action committee (PAC) Musk backs took it a step further, launching a group on X called the Election Integrity Community. The group has over 50,000 members and was designed to be a place for users to come together to share information about voter fraud or questionable practices in the upcoming election.

Trump and his allies accuse Smartmatic and other companies of rigging the vote for Biden. And as Trump’s attorneys, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, piled up false claims in court, armies of online supporters descended on employees like Smith. Twitter users found his work history at several voting tech companies and concluded, “This must be the guy,” he recalls. People were “threatening me, wanting to come to my house and show me some love.” Smith had been proud of his years of experience — work he considered a public benefit. But as Trump undercut trust in the system, Smith’s own mother believed the election had been stolen. I was sad due to the misinformation and online attacks.

Smith says that the industry was surprised by the intensity of misinformation in 2020, despite the fact that activists had been sowing doubt for a long time. False claims weren’t coming just from fringe figures but the then-sitting president and leader of the Republican Party. Fox News was repeating their claims.

Media Matters said that election lies aren’t gone from conservative news outlets. John Whitehouse, an adviser for Media Matters says that the difference between now and the year 2049 is that the MAGA personality has been able to steer conversations away from potential defamatory claims while those on social media continue to circulate. The core audience of the media wants more election denial, and they are going to give it to them.

Voting technology companies aren’t the only ones trying to explain how these systems work and defend their reliability. State governments make fact-check pages about election myths. Election authorities have emphasized ways that voters can observe the system — like livestreams of ballot processing facilities. In the weeks and months leading to the election, local election offices conduct extensive public testing of voting machines.

Sara Cutter, the executive director of the nonpartisan trade group American Council for Election Technology, says that letting voters observe the process can help. Jay Schneider was skeptical about the election process in 2020. When the 2020 election came around, I was thinking about what had been going on. In a Spotlight PA story he stated that there are some shenanigans going around and around the country. But after working the polls himself, he became so persuaded by the strength of the checks and balances in the system that he decided to take on a bigger role in the process as a judge of elections.

Smith believes that personal experience with the system is important. He says that throwing the election in the manner that people are saying it’s thrown would be impossible.

Successful persuasion depends on the person and situation, though, in Smith’s experience. Many people are content with learning more about the checks on the election system that prevent fraud, he says, but for “some percentage of people … you can tell them whatever you want to tell them, you can show them whatever you want to show them, it just doesn’t seem to sink in.”

Part of the problem is that conspiracy theorists — including Trump and allies like Giuliani — have undercut trust in the very institutions trying to restore it. Smith says that people are not willing to visit the Secretary of State’s website to find out that vote by mail is safe. Now, people just simply don’t believe that individual.”

Some false claims may stem from misunderstandings. The industry was surprised that 98 percent of the jurisdictions use paper ballots and that some use electronic devices designed for greater accessibility.

Likewise, while ensuring voting machines are secure is important, these machines are just one part of a larger system. The government itself is similar to the American elections’ checks and balances. “Basically no two jurisdictions are going to have the exact same mix of technology and election administration procedures that allow them to be compromised at a systemic level.”

An attacker would need to learn about many different combinations of hardware and software in order to do significant nationwide damage. There are processes to catch machinery that is not working as expected so you cannot just flip a switch and change election results.

The backlash against voting tech companies has steeled their resolve and many people stay in this space after elections. But it is still taking a toll. Some ACET members have even made emergency plans for moving offices, she says.

They are not the only people who are preparing for the possibility of violence. Election officials across the country have increased their security because of threats. In Arizona, election workers have undergone active shooter drills, and an election office has armed guards and metal detectors, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. A few days before Election Day, Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, have seen fires at ballot boxes.

Cutter has a question for people who believe false narratives about rigged elections: “why is it that you want that to be true? Because I still believe in America. I believe in innovation, in hopes of making the world a better place. I think that we have built into our systems accountability and American resilience.