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Rumors vs Reality
❌Rumor: I received an election-related email that looks like it came from a certain organization, so the organization must have sent it. ✔️Reality: Cyber actors can forge emails to look like they came from someone else. This common tactic is called email spoofing, where attackers send an email pretending to be from a specific domain or organization in an attempt to harvest personal data or spread malware. Such spoofed emails can also be used to disseminate false or inflammatory information. To send realistic-looking emails, cyber actors may forge the sender address to hide the origin of an email or set up spoofed domains that have a slightly different name from the real domain. Always be wary of out of the ordinary emails and look to trusted sources, such as the organization’s official website, in order to verify. Never provide personal information or download files from suspicious emails. If you receive a suspicious election-related email, consider reporting it to your local election official or local FBI field office. Useful Resources
❌Rumor: A malicious actor can easily defraud an election using the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB). ✔️Reality: This is false. Changing an election using fraudulently submitted FWABs would be highly difficult to do. This is because election offices have security measures in place to detect such activity. The FWAB is primarily used as a backup ballot for military and overseas voters who requested but did not yet receive their absentee ballot. FWAB users must provide their signature and meet varying state voter registration and absentee ballot request requirements, which can include provision of full or partial social security number, state identification number, proof of identification, and/or witness signature. Since only military and overseas voters are eligible to use the FWAB, relatively few of them are submitted each election. In 2016, states reported that only 23,291 total FWABs were submitted nationwide, with all but six states receiving less than 1,000 FWABs statewide. Since use is relatively rare, spikes in FWAB usage would be detected as anomalous. Useful Resources
PRE-ELECTION
❌Rumor: Someone possessing or posting voter registration data means voter registration databases have been hacked.
✔️Reality: Voter registration information is public information and is available to political campaigns, researchers, and often members of the public, frequently for purchase. According to a recent FBI and CISA public alert, cyber actors may make false claims of “hacked” voter information to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions. Useful Resources
❌Rumor: An online voter registration website experiences an outage and claims are made the election has been compromised. ✔️Reality: Outages in online voter registration systems occur for a variety of reasons, including configuration errors, hardware issues, natural disasters, communications infrastructure issues, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. As CISA and FBI warned in a recent public alert, a system outage does not necessarily mean the integrity of voter registration information or any other election system has been impacted. When an outage occurs, election officials work to verify the integrity of voter registration information. Useful Resources
❌Rumor: If state or local jurisdiction information technology (IT) has been compromised, the election results cannot be trusted. ✔️Reality: Hacks of state and local IT systems should not be minimized; however, a compromise of state or local IT systems does not mean those systems are election-related. Even if an election-related system is compromised, a compromise of a system does not necessarily mean the integrity of the vote has been affected. Election officials have multiple safeguards and contingencies in place, including provisional ballots or backup paper poll books that limit the impact from a cyber incident with minimal disruption to voting. Additionally, having an auditable paper record ensures that the vote count can be verified and validated. Useful Resources
❌Rumor: Videos, images or emails suggesting voter registration information is being manipulated means voters will not be able to vote. ✔️Reality: Claims are easy to fake and can be used for disinformation purposes. If voter registration data were to be manipulated, states have several safeguards in place to enable voters to vote, including offline backups of registration data, provisional ballots, and in several states, same-day registration. Useful Resources
❌Rumor: A malicious actor can easily defraud an election by printing and sending in extra mail-in ballots. ✔️Reality: This is false. Committing fraud through photocopied or home-printed ballots would be highly difficult to do successfully. This is because each local election office has security measures in place to detect such malicious activity. While the specific measures vary, in accordance with state and local election laws and practices, such security measures include signature matching, information checks, barcodes, watermarks, and precise paper weights. Useful Resource ELECTION DAY
❌Rumor: Someone is claiming to know who I voted for. ✔️Reality: Ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in all states. Election officials implement various safeguards to protect voters’ choices from being viewable or knowable by others, including the election officials themselves. With few exceptions, these security measures ensure that individual ballots, once cast, cannot be traced back to the voters who cast them. For in-person voting, privacy measures include dividers between voting stations and requirements that poll workers maintain distance from voters while they are casting their ballots. For mail-in and provisional voting, election officials follow strict procedures to ensure ballot secrecy when ballots are retrieved from mail-in and provisional ballot envelopes. Ballot secrecy rights may be voluntarily waived by voters in certain circumstances, and waiver may be required in some of these, such as military and overseas voters that vote by fax or e-mail. While ballot choices are secret in almost all circumstances, a voter’s party affiliation and history of voting generally are not. Information contained in voter registration records, such as name, address, phone number, and political party affiliation (in states with party-based voter registration), is generally available to political parties and others. This data also regularly contains information on whether a voter voted in a particular election, but not their ballot choices. Useful Resources
❌Rumor: If polling place lookup sites experience an outage, election infrastructure must have been compromised. ✔️Reality: Polling place lookup sites, like all websites, may experience outages for a variety of reasons, impacting their availability to voters. Polling place lookup sites are not connected to infrastructure that counts votes and are typically segmented from infrastructure that enables voting, such as the voter registration database. Election officials will point potential voters to alternate tools and resources for this information in the event of an issue. Useful Resources POST-ELECTION
❌Rumor: If election night reporting sites experience an outage, vote counts will be lost or manipulated.
✔️Reality: Election night results are not official results. These sites may experience outages due to a variety of issues including too many people trying to view the site or cyberattacks. Such disruptions do not impact the integrity of votes or the official certified results. Election results made available on election night are always unofficial. Official results are rigorously canvassed (reviewed), and certified by local and state election officials. Most states have requirements for post-election audits as well. Useful Resources
❌Rumor: If the election night reporting webpage is defaced or displays incorrect results, the integrity of the election is compromised. ✔️Reality: If a webpage has been defaced or is displaying incorrect results, it would not impact the integrity of votes or the official certified results. Election results made available on election night are always unofficial. Useful Resources
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