The Consequences of Misinformation: Creating Policies that Further Complicate our Electoral Administration System

Hey, everyone!

I’m Bridget Goodman, and I am the co-executive director of Arch Policy Institute alongside Andy Wyatt. 

Last week, I attended a panel hosted by the Online News Association’s Conference regarding the upcoming election. The conference detailed the issues caused by our country’s decentralized election administration system, where states exert massive amounts of power around how elections logistically function. 

Perhaps the biggest consequence of our fragmented, piecemeal election administration system is that it is super, duper confusing. 

The built-in complexity and incohesiveness with our patchwork elections administration system makes it really easy for disinformation to rally political pressure behind elections reforms that seem like they would make sense — but actually don’t. Often, this political pressure takes advantage of valid concerns surrounding all of the confusing technicalities of elections administration. For instance, politicians contrived concern about voting machines being vulnerable to internet cyber attacks when, in fact, voting machines are not even connected to the internet. 

Now, because of these falsified concerns of election fraud, the Georgia State Board of Elections passed a rule requiring polling precincts to hand-count the number of ballots — not how those ballots are marked — to ensure the number of ballots counted by the machine match the totals counted by election officials. 

The issue with hand-counts is that they are far more unreliable than machine county. In Nye County, Nevada, where the county clerk implemented his own hand-count ballot initiative, the clerk estimated a 25% error rate in the hand-count. A study in New Hampshire found hand-counting to have an error rate 16 times larger than the machine-count error rate.

Not only is hand-counting more unreliable than machine-counts, but it takes up more time. In the 2022 primaries, it took over seven hours for elections officials to hand-count 317 ballots in Nevada’s least populous county. In the last presidential election in Athens-Clarke County, voters cast nearly 56,654 ballots. Even in the most recent county-wide election, which had only 19.73% of registered voters turnout to vote, voters cast 13,804 ballots. In Georgia, there are 2,400 precincts that would all be attempting to meet the state’s November 12 certification deadline.

This new rule speaks to an issue in policy not unique to elections administration: ill-thought out policies tied to fundamental misunderstandings of facts. When messaging becomes embedded in a policy area — like claims voting machines are not secure — no matter how inaccurate, they affect policy. Moreover, this messaging can be even more powerful when it seems to offer a simple solution to a complicated, hard to understand problem.

The hand-count rule demonstrates the power of messaging, with many voters viewing the move as further securing elections. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2022, about 90% of registered voters are confident elections in their community will be well-run and 70% say the same for elections across the nation.

To further the controversy, the new hand-count rule is being challenged in court, with a lawsuit claiming that the rule is beyond the Georgia State Board of Elections’s authority. Regardless of what ultimately happens with the rule’s enforcement, what remains is the issue of how politically inaccurate messaging, built on disinformation, can easily infiltrate policy. In turn, organizations like API, which facilitate in-depth conversations which cut past superficial messaging are all the more valuable.