| 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. But a delay could also stoke instability. Secretaries of State embracing the idea of a prolonged counting and reporting period must also help voters understand that delayed results aren't less reliable. On this front, President Trump, who has tweeted or retweeted attacks on mail-in ballots more than 20 times since April 8, isn't helping.
"One of our biggest constraints in 2016 to deal with Russian interference was Trump out there saying the election was rigged," said Andrew Grotto, a research fellow at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center and the former senior director for cybersecurity policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations. "That was a self-inflicted wound. He's doing the same thing now by claiming that postal ballots and delayed results will promote election fraud, and this is untrue." If Trump and other politicians don't move to quell election unrest, that means that a greater responsibility not to stoke outrage or even violence could fall to social media platforms. And it's not clear that they're ready for the challenge. There are two windows of time in particular that will stress the platforms in new ways: the time between polls closing and results getting certified, and the weeks between when a winner is declared and Inauguration Day. These periods may very well serve as the greatest tests of Facebook and Twitter's ability to co-exist with democracy.
So far, Twitter has been the only one of the two willing to brand the president's misinformation for failing its fact-check standards. But the company acknowledges that it lacks the capacity to regulate all misinformation. Twitter's Trust and Safety team fact-checks high-profile tweets, though it's one of many responsibilities the team has. Meanwhile, Facebook has greater resources to fact-check content, yet Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly declined to intervene when Trump has attacked the credibility of the voting process without hard evidence.
If social media companies want to avoid becoming a force for unrest after Nov. 3, they're going to have to do more, said Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University. And before long, they could be faced with a crucial choice over whether to curtail inaccurate voting content from Trump. "So far, they've put their toe in some water," Geltzer said. "But it's going to be very difficult to stop there. It seems more likely that they'll soon have to decide if they're willing to start swimming." —Kartikay Mehrotra | 
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