The post-election threats you need to prepare for, according to experts

After weeks of early voting, voters on Tuesday will head to the polls across the country to determine the next President of the United States.

But federal agencies, state and local election officials, and experts say that while American voters will ultimately choose the next chief executive, they are preparing for a chaotic, disruptive and messy post-election period. One where foreign nations, domestic political groups and other bad actors will attempt to take advantage of a deeply divided electorate during a uniquely vulnerable time in America’s electoral cycle.

Last cycle, driven primarily by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, the period between Nov. 5 and inauguration on Jan. 20 was subjected to a torrent of lies about nonexistent election fraud, court challenges, attempts to block certification in swing states and the infamous Jan. 6 mob uprising at the U.S. Capitol, which was all meant to cast doubt or overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

This year, CyberScoop canvassed a wide range of officials, experts and observers about the scenarios they are most concerned about this period and why. Their responses make it clear that states and election officials will have to navigate a wide range of threats to the integrity of the election after voters have had their say.

An important note: while the degrees of confidence varied, most officials CyberScoop spoke with expressed the view that despite risks and challenges, the American public should feel confident that their votes will be accurately counted in the upcoming elections and officials will be able to determine the winner.

The five dates between now and inauguration to watch for

Social media networks  and other sources are already riddled with false claims about election irregularities, partisan voter suppression efforts and looming mass voter fraud.

While experts expect a steady stream of this content over the next two months, there are five dates that election watchers have flagged as pressure points where efforts to deceive and disrupt will be most intense. Each one of these dates represents a key procedural step necessary to transfer power from one presidential administration to the next, and as 2020 demonstrated, they can be focal points for bad actors and disinformation campaigns. 

Tuesday, Nov. 5: The first is Election Day on Nov. 5.. Intelligence agencies have said to expect rising instances of false content about election irregularities, something that has been borne out repeatedly in the past week. As some states report election results sooner than others, the first few weeks after Nov. 5 could create a waiting period ripe for disinformation actors.

Wednesday, Dec. 11: An update to the Electoral Count Act in 2022 created a Dec. 11 deadline for all 50 states to file a “certificate of ascertainment” putting forth slates of electors. Nicole Schneidman, a technology public policy strategist at the non-profit Protect Democracy, called out the week prior as “potentially a high-risk period where we may see again attempts by county or state officials to refuse to certify election results.”

Tuesday, Dec. 17: States will convene the electoral college. This will be done at state capitols across the country, making them a potential target for protests, disruptions and violence.

Monday, Jan. 6: Congress certifies election results. For the first time, the Department of Homeland Security has designated this day as a National Special Security Event, something that allows for “significant resources from the federal government, as well as from state and local partners, to be utilized in a comprehensive security plan” according to the U.S. Secret Service. 

Monday, Jan. 20: Inauguration Day, when the President will be sworn in. Already designated a National Special Security Event, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she and other local officials as well as local law enforcement will be operating out of a new joint command center with federal and local partners “throughout election week and beyond” to respond to security concerns facing the inauguration.  

Morgan Adamski, executive director of U.S. Cyber Command, told CyberScoop that her agency is planning to continue focusing on disrupting foreign networks targeting U.S. elections and supporting partners in the election community “as we lead up to [election day] but also until we get a certification.”

Perception hacks

John Hultquist, lead within Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, noted that both Russia and Iran have a history of attempting disruption campaigns right before or on Election Day by leaking materials, challenging vote tally integrity.  

 “A superficial change to an official voting system [isn’t] going to alter the outcome, but it could be used to undermine it,” Hultquist noted last week in a thread on X. “This is a consistent theme from these operators. They are more often focused on the psychological impacts of their activity than the practical effects.”

Adam Darrah, a former CIA analyst with a background in Russia, said Americans should be on the lookout for “bluffs about large scale data breaches from hacktivist groups and lone actors” that could potentially resonate with the losing candidate’s supporters.

“Technically, we are sound. However, emotionally, we are vulnerable and easily triggered,” Darrah, now a vice president of intelligence at ZeroFox, told CyberScoop.

The most important thing to remember, said Kim Wyman, former Washington Secretary of State and election lead at CISA, is that these claims “only affect how people think about the election.”

“They’re not affecting the actual [election] infrastructure, our systems,” said Wyman.

Attacks on court legitimacy

Court challenges in elections are nothing new, nor are criticisms of unfavorable results.

But for Suzanne Spaulding, a former Department of Homeland Security official who led the National Protection and Programs Directorate (now CISA), the potential for foreign and domestic actors to attack the credibility of the U.S. court system in the post-election period “doesn’t get enough attention.”

Trump in particular has a history of attacking judges and courts who rule against his interests, often through personal attacks and charges of corruption. A report by the U.S. Marshals Service found that in 2020 alone, the agency responded to 4,261 threats and inappropriate communications against federal judges, U.S. attorneys, prosecutors, court officials and their families. That’s more than 80% higher than what court officials faced in 2016 and 233% higher than 2008.

“The courts are going to make decisions, and the losing side is going to claim that the judge was just being political,” Spaulding told CyberScoop.

In addition to domestic actors, adversarial foreign nations will go after the courts if they deem it advantageous to do so. Spaulding points out that fake websites from Russian influence groups like Doppelganger have referenced corrupt or bribed courts, and as campaigns file post-election legal challenges, she expects Russian propaganda organs to continue targeting the U.S. judicial system to stoke unrest.

“Americans need to be reminded that our democracy will not work if we don’t view court decisions – whether we think they are legitimate or not – as determinative,” said Spaulding. “This idea that we can just ignore a court decision because we think it’s illegitimate, that way lies the ruin of democracy.”

Pullback from social media companies on election violence

Social media platforms like Facebook, Telegram, X (then Twitter), and others were central to the planning and organization of pro-Trump supporters leading up to Jan. 6. While the attack on the Capitol led companies to temporarily ban Trump’s account and rigorously moderate content casting doubt on elections results, those efforts have diminished considerably over the past four years.   

Companies like Meta have cut trust and safety staff and ended collaborations with independent researchers on election impacts. A report by Meta’s Oversight Board found most threats to election officials on their platform were not removed, being considered free speech.

“We recommended that during a period of a heightened risk of violence, such messages should not be protected under the guise of the right to protest,” the board wrote.

Meanwhile, X has been transformed into a content moderation free-for-all, as disinformation experts say new owner Elon Musk has sought to use the platform’s algorithm to help elect Trump.

For Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a progressive member of Congress who was at the Capitol on that day, his biggest fear is “that social media tools are used in the way they were used for Jan. 6.”

“That they’re used to organize demonstrations, rallies that end up turning into riots, and end up turning violent, and that social media companies sit on that information, as opposed to alerting protectively law enforcement when there are clear threats of violence on these social media sites,” Khanna said in response to a question from CyberScoop at during a press briefing last week.

Fake media to stoke real anger

U.S. intelligence agencies have been signaling for weeks that foreign actors, particularly Russia, are aiming to flood the post-election landscape with false claims about voter fraud, or distort the kind of small but non-determinative errors that pop up in every election cycle into larger narratives of intentional election rigging.

Over the past week federal agencies have flagged videos of Trump ballots being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Haitian immigrants voting with multiple IDs in Georgia and the FBI warning about Democratic-led ballot fraud as false media designed to undermine the election.

In all three cases, intelligence agencies or private researchers have directly traced those videos to Russian influence groups. But they are just a sample of fake or manipulated media that has been pumped out over the past few weeks, virtually all of which has been debunked by local, state and federal officials. Officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence say they expect more to come.

Citing new intelligence gleaned in the last month, an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence speaking on background said they expect foreign influence efforts “will intensify in the lead up to election day, especially through social media posts, some of which are likely to be AI-generated or enhanced.”

Election integrity groups have created tools to find “evidence” of fraud

Domestically, a report from the University of Washington found that many right-wing election integrity groups have repurposed tools, apps and other resources to build a massive “evidence generation infrastructure” designed to falsely suggest widespread fraud and irregularities. 

These tools create quick and easy ways for supporters to file first-hand reports of perceived suspicious behaviors at polling locations and are leveraged in service of a larger goal that the center refers to as “The Three C’s.”: Convince the public that elections are insecure, collect unverified reports of widespread irregularities and use that information to contest election results.

“This year we’ve had an interesting dynamic at play…what appears to be a political strategy almost, of using that collective sense making process and fueling it with digital infrastructure, with tools and with rhetoric” to create a groundswell of public evidence to undermine voting results, said Danielle Lee Tomson, a research manager at the center.

This “evidence”  often gathered by uninformed sympathizers , can create a false perception of widespread election fraud, despite most claims being eventually debunked.