[Break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. I’m Leah Feiger. Joining me in the studio is another writer from our politics team, Vittoria Elliott. Tori, welcome.
Vittoria Elliott: Hey, Leah. How you doing?
Leah Feiger: Great. Talk to us about the story you just published.
Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. So I think before we even start with that, we’re going to get a little bit nerdy and talk about what a FOIA is.
Leah Feiger: Love it. Let’s get there.
Vittoria Elliott: So a FOIA is a Freedom of Information Act request. It’s a letter or an email you can send to a public official to be like, “Hey, there’s government information on this. I would like it. Please send it to me, or tell me why you can’t.”
Leah Feiger: Journalists love a FOIA.
Vittoria Elliott: We do love a FOIA. We use them a lot. And FOIAs have been a really key way that election deniers have been overwhelming local government and election workers looking for instances of voter fraud. Sometimes they’re truly just digging for the same type of stuff that David highlighted in the first segment where they’re looking for names or looking for instances where ballots may have been miscounted or mishandled, and sometimes it really is just an effort to gum up the processes of government. But either way, this has been an ongoing thing and experts that I spoke to said they’re really concerned now about the addition of generative AI on top of this process.
Leah Feiger: There’s so much to unpack there. So after the 2020 election, Trump et al. alleged that there had been massive voter fraud. Election deniers just started bombarding local election officials with FOIA requests.
Vittoria Elliott: Yes. And FOIAs are great, but government workers are legally mandated to respond to them within a certain amount of time. So they have this urgency to them.
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Vittoria Elliott: That can be really difficult if you’re trying to respond to a FOIA while you’re also trying to make sure an election runs smoothly.
Leah Feiger: Talk to me more about these election workers and their responsibilities here.
Vittoria Elliott: These are the people that say, “Make sure you get your mail-in ballot on time.”
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Vittoria Elliott: They’re the people who actually run the mechanics of an election. Oftentimes, they maintain a voter roll for their county or their precinct, and they’re the people who are making sure, again, that you get registered, that you can reach out to with any problems. They’re the people behind the system.
Leah Feiger: What does this all mean for 2024, and how does AI have anything to do with this?
Vittoria Elliott: Great question. Just like you can ask something like ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot to write you an English paper and it can spit something out for you in about a couple of seconds, you can also ask it to write a FOIA.
Leah Feiger: Dangerous or great.
Vittoria Elliott: Well, this is the problem. So when I spoke with David Levine, a former election worker, and now who’s advising elections for the German Marshall Fund, he told me that we could be looking at a really big problem.
David Levine: There have been election officials that have been overwhelmed with FOIA requests, and basically generative AI provides means by which to do it that is cheaper, faster, and easier to do. This is something that election officials have to be at least aware of and trying to plan for.
Leah Feiger: Okay. So you got to tell us you tried this out for yourself. You made a couple of FOIAs using AI.
Vittoria Elliott: I did. So I wanted to test what these chatbots would do when asked to generate a FOIA about instances of voter fraud. Google’s Gemini will not generate a FOIA for you.
Leah Feiger: Thank you, Google.
Vittoria Elliott: ChatGPT, which is run by OpenAI, will. So would Meta’s open source Llama 2. But I think the most interesting one was actually Microsoft’s Copilot, which responded to a very generic question with specific language that said, “Please return any instances of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election specifically.”
Leah Feiger: Yikes. Microsoft’s AI platform itself actually mentioned 2020 without you bringing it up?
Vittoria Elliott: Without me bringing it at all. I didn’t ask which election. So it could have been a state election, it could have been a local election, could have been a federal election. I didn’t say what kind of election. I didn’t say what year. I didn’t say anything.
David Gilbert: When I saw that, it was terrifying to me that it was so efficient and so well done. It was incredible. How is this issue going to be solved? Is it down to the platforms who allow people to use these chatbots, or is it going to be on the election official site? Will they going to have to implement some system where it allows them to detect if an AI is producing these FOIA requests?
Vittoria Elliott: It’s very difficult to tell when something has been generated by generative AI. There are attempts to regulate these things, and some companies do what’s called watermarking where it will tag an image or the product that’s generated so that another machine can recognize that it’s been generated by AI. So if you have sort of a machine that’s reading it’ll flag it. In text, something like FOIA that might mean using a word more frequently than it would show up in natural language, and that would alert a computer like, “Hey, this has been generated by a machine.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that a human would be able to recognize that. And it also doesn’t mean that we have the technology on the government side to do that. I will say, the law in Washington state, they had to change it to reroute requests to the Secretary of State’s office. They also changed the law to allow election workers to not fulfill FOIA requests that they are pretty convinced come from a bot or from a machine. But again, if you can’t tell, how can you make the legal case to not fulfill that FOIA?
Leah Feiger: Right. I want to talk a little bit about the people that are actually impacted by all of these FOIA requests, the election workers. They’re getting flooded with these requests and can’t do their jobs.
Vittoria Elliott: One expert we spoke to, Tammy Patrick, the CEO of the National Association for Election Officials, said that she’s heard from election workers who are telling her, especially in smaller counties where there’s maybe only one or two people, that they’re filling FOIA requests from 9 to 5. They’re not actually able to do their normal election duties until after work hours.
Leah Feiger: So much.
Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. It’s crazy and it’s an incredible burden on the system.
Leah Feiger: And it’s just one part of it. I mean, for years we’ve been seeing reports on election workers getting harassed, intimidated. David, you have a new piece out on how election workers are faring in 2024 already. Talk to us about it. Talk to us about everything else going on.
David Gilbert: I think one official summed it up by saying they’re exhausted. They’re kind of putting on a brave face and saying they’re going to be ready for 2024 just because that is what they have to do. Underneath that kind of bravado, there is definitely, when you speak to them, a sense that the last three years has been a huge, huge challenge. Everything stems obviously from the disinformation that we’ve seen around the 2020 vote and the direct impact of that is obviously the threats and the intimidation that these election officials have faced. But there’s indirect results as well. People’s health has suffered. People have resigned. They can’t fill positions. There’s been budget shortfalls because the money has had to go to secure election offices around the country. So I think overall, there’s been a huge impact on the election system in the US over
the last four years.
Vittoria Elliott: And in some cases, election workers themselves are in the positions of having to dispel disinformation in the course of their jobs, and they’re the front lines of debunking.
David Gilbert: Yeah. The election officials feel like they have to, or at least some election officials feel it’s their job to meet us head on. I spoke to Stephen Richer in Arizona who’s one of the most prominent people doing this, who uses his Twitter quite a lot to debunk information. Some of his tweets have gone viral, but lots of them haven’t and a lot of it is just consistent day after day shooting down complete lies about how the election system works, which is—it must take a huge toll. He says himself, when he reads his replies to his messages, it just oppresses him about the state of the country and what people believe about elections today.
Leah Feiger: And the impact on him is undeniable. I mean, I have to read this quote from your interview with him. It’s right in front of me. He says, “Our main facility is a fortress now. We have gates up around the clock. We have badge access around the clock. We have general security outside of our facility. And because we have an election going on right now, we have additional security, additional barriers, additional patrols.” This is from the primary, right?
David Gilbert: Yeah. This isn’t even the actual election. This is from the Arizona primary. So it’s quite incredible talking to these people. They talk in sometimes militarized terms about what their elections look like now. And that’s just such an incredible way to think about what is the basis of any democracy. And it’s incredible how quickly it’s got to this point.
Leah Feiger: It’s terrifying. Are election officials worried this is going to continue getting worse this year?
Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. And they’re leaving their jobs? A really interesting report that just came out this week from the Bipartisan Policy Center actually found that basically since 2020, there’s been a near 40 percent turnover rate. That is so much in election officials. And just for comparison because I have the chart here. In 2012, that was 28 percent. So they’ve seen more turnover than historically we’ve ever seen. So that means that you’re going to have new people in these jobs. Hopefully they get filled. They’re going to have new people in these jobs who are dealing with all the pressures that David and I have looked at in a really important election year.
David Gilbert: I think that institutional knowledge, part of it is something that, fair enough, someone leaves their job and can be replaced. And in some cases they have processes in place where they can quickly learn what to do. But in other states and other counties, because it’s different than every one, they don’t that. So I think the knock-on effect of this loss of institution knowledge won’t really be known until long after the 2024 vote.
Leah Feiger: How does this impact voters? What will this look like in November? What could this look like in November?
David Gilbert: While speaking to secretaries of state across the country for this piece, they were all very positive about how the vote would go. They said that despite everything, the institutions will remain and that the election will be run properly and run on time. And we saw in 2020, it was declared the most secure US election in history. So they’re backing up on that. But I think voters, it’s very hard to tell how they will feel about this election, whether the amount of disinformation, the amount of noise, the amount of hate that’s being spread will impact whether they think it’s worked voting. Will the people who have been listening to disinformation for the last four years think, “Well, what’s the point? Voting, it’s just going to be stolen anyway.” So they’ll stay at home. Which could backfire on the people who are actually spreading the disinformation.
Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about our favorite conspiracies of the week.
