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Earlier this year, a group of former government officials and technology executives gathered for an election simulation exercise. They wanted to rehearse scenarios around the possibility of controversial AI deepfakes emerging on election day. In one of these mock scenarios, a phone call informed some Arizonans that polling places were closed due to militia threats, while a second one showed photos of Florida poll workers trashing ballots.
Although neither incident was true, in this particular simulation the deepfake stories went viral and sowed chaos around the country. As NBC News reported:
“It was jarring for folks in the room to see how quickly just a handful of these types of threats could spiral out of control and really dominate the election cycle,” said Miles Taylor, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official who helped organize the exercise for the Washington-based nonprofit The Future US.
Dubbed “The Deepfake Dilemma,” the exercise illustrated how AI-enabled tools threaten to turbocharge the spread of false information in an already polarized society and could sow chaos in the 2024 election, multiple participants told NBC News …
They said it raised worrisome questions about whether federal and local officials — and the tech industry — are prepared to counter both foreign and domestic disinformation designed to undermine public confidence in the election results.
Although this may be something akin to a worst case scenario, there are examples out there of the ways in which AI technology could certainly be used to sow chaos or confusion during an election.
AI-generated pictures, for instance, can be quite convincing at first glance. Have you seen these photos yet of Donald Trump mingling happily with Black voters? The photo below isn’t real, but it was made by Trump supporters using AI to supposedly show Trump’s support in the Black community.
Or, for a video example, the Arizona Agenda recently made an intriguing deepfake of Senate candidate Kari Lake. The video, in which Lake discusses her (alleged) support for the Agenda, was actually made to warn about the dangers of AI and the piece instructs readers on how to spot deepfakes. Still, this isn’t clear for the first few seconds that Lake talks to the camera and the seeming realism of the video shows what could be accomplished by someone with more malevolent intentions.
As Hank Stephenson of the Agenda wrote: “The 2024 election is going to be the first in history where any idiot with a computer can create convincing videos depicting fake events of global importance and publish them to the world in a matter of minutes.”
Deepfakes and democracy
Indeed, the news is filled these days with stories about the potential effects of AI technology on democracy. New York Magazine published a rundown of various ways in which AI has generated political news. The Wall Street Journal has a piece on how China is even now using AI to spread disinformation to American voters. And the New York Times talked to tech executives who are concerned that AI could be used to disrupt or swing an election.
More ominously, there is the story of how AI may already have upended an election in Europe. In Slovakia recently, just days before a national vote, an audio recording surfaced that showed one of the leading candidates, Michal Šimečkas, talking about how he’d rigged the balloting.
Just as in the U.S., there were conspiracy theories in the air in Slovakia about electoral fraud, so this apparent proof of vote rigging went viral (though the recording was later shown to be a fake). While it’s difficult to prove that this definitively impacted the vote, Šimečkas did go on to lose that election — curiously, to a candidate who supported “closer ties to Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
This is very much a 2024 story in the sense that these AI tools have only recently become widely available. But deepfakes themselves are not new. Political tricksters have managed to manipulate elections in the past, even when they had to use more rudimentary technology. Like pen and paper.
One example, in 1972, involved Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. As primary season kicked off that year, Muskie was the leading Democratic candidate for his party’s presidential nomination and was tied in national polls with President Richard Nixon. But prior to the New Hampshire primary, the Manchester Union-Leader newspaper published the “Canuck Letter,” from a man who said he’d heard Muskie describe French-Canadians (Canucks) as New Hampshire Blacks. This was a big deal in a state where French-Canadians made up a significant bloc of voters, and Muskie plummeted in state polls.
This wasn’t the entire reason for the collapse of Muskie’s candidacy, but it was a considerable factor and he later withdrew from the race. It eventually came to light that the Canuck letter was a forgery, written by a staffer for the Nixon campaign.
The 1880 forgery that nearly upended a U.S. presidential election
Then there was the hoax that dramatically impacted the presidential election of 1880.
That year, the election was a battle between Republican Congressman James Garfield of Ohio and the Democratic nominee, General Winfield Scott Hancock. It was one of the closest popular vote elections in U.S. history. Of more than 9 million ballots cast, less than 10,000 votes separated the contenders, with Garfield winning 48.3-48.2%.
Although Garfield won the election, an incident late in the campaign might have accounted for some of the closeness of the popular vote and may well have cost him a win in the state of California.
In this case, a New York newspaper on October 21 published what became known as the “Morey letter,” in which Garfield seemed to advocate for using Chinese immigrants as cheap labor in a note to an H.L. Morey of the Employers Union in Lynn, Massachusetts.
This was a big issue at the time, as tens of thousands of Chinese workers had come to the U.S. to build the railroads and later settled in the West. This Chinese presence generated resentment over their alleged stealing of American jobs, similar to the immigrant furor that is a major issue in American politics today. In the 1870s and 1880s, anti-Chinese riots broke out in various U.S. cities, one of them in Denver just prior to the 1880 election.
Needless to say, any proof that a presidential candidate had advocated for using these immigrants as a deliberate source of cheap labor would be a big deal. The letter was described as “Garfield’s death warrant,” and Democrats made a half million copies to distribute to voters.
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The document was eventually shown to be a fake, but no proof of who produced it was ever found (nor did there appear to be an actual H.L. Morey either). But the news damaged the candidate late in the campaign, especially in the West. California was home to many of these Chinese immigrants and Garfield lost that state narrowly to Hancock, by just 144 votes.
Garfield still won the Electoral College, but if New York (which Garfield won by 21,033 votes out of 1.1 million ballots) had flipped to the Democrat then Hancock would have won the election. So it’s easy to see a scenario where this faked letter could have decided the U.S. presidency that year. It was described at the time as “the most extraordinary and infamous achievement in political fraud-doing ever perpetrated by any political party in this country.”
If a single letter could do that much damage in 1880, imagine what a viral video (or audio recording) could do today in the age of social media. Or better yet, ask the Slovakians.
The impact of the Canuck Letter and the Morey Letter are examples of the type of stories you can find in my book, “Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America.”
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