Why US ballot count live streams became misinformation magnets

At a vote-counting center in Montgomery county, Maryland, a man sat in a room with other election workers, wearing a grey hat and dark purple rubber gloves. He unfolded a ballot, looked around and leaned forward to mark it. The man appeared on a Yahoo Finance livestream of the center. The video went viral, one version ending up on YouTube, where the narrator said they found it on 4chan.

“Do you notice that, folks?” said the narrator. “How he looks around to see if anyone is watching him – as if he’s about to commit a crime?”

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The video spread across social media, viewers claiming the election worker was committing fraud. Then election officials launched an investigation and found the voter hadn’t used a dark enough pen to mark their ballot; the worker was darkening their selections – a routine practice.

Live streams of the ballot count aren’t a new phenomenon. But this year the practice exploded as Donald Trump cast doubts on the integrity of the vote and the pandemic made in-person options of observing the vote difficult. In the aftermath of a fraught election, many are still grappling to figure out if this method of achieving transparency is too vulnerable to being manipulated or taken out of context to further a political agenda.

When Paul Andrews was elected auditor of Kitsap county, Washington, two years ago, the first thing he did was implement a live stream of the ballot count. It was a no-brainer to Andrews, and with his IT background, easy to facilitate. Some people, he said, looked at their favorite vacation spot from their computer during their lunch break. Andrews, instead, watched the count.

But this year was different. The 2020 election had occupied Andrews’ mind for years leading up to the count, and he not only led the livestreaming effort, but also hired and trained more staff and upgraded equipment so election day could run without controversy. “Everything we’ve done over these last couple years has been in preparation for this,” Andrews said.

Election officials across the country, like Andrews, began to prepare even before the pandemic. In Arizona, state legislators passed a law in 2019 requiring that each county have a live stream. As pro-Trump protesters convened outside vote-counting centers in Maricopa county, demanding that the vote be counted, the live streams became a way for the public to observe the count themselves.

“Arizona does a lot of things wrong,” said the Arizona state senator Martín Quezada, from Maricopa county, who introduced the bill. “But the way we run our elections, I think we’ve been doing it very, very well.”

The concerns from officials about the general election were legitimate: Trump has refused to concede the election to Joe Biden and in many states, Republicans have challenged the results. Some claims can directly be refuted by the live streams.

“It’s a real testament to how transparent [election officials] wanted this process,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “The Trump campaign is continuing to say that observers weren’t allowed in … We’ve got 24/7 video evidence of the counting process that anyone could watch showing observers in these locations.”

But while thousands tuned into the live streams, these efforts sometimes backfired.

In Delaware county, Pennsylvania, a video was taken from the live stream showing a woman filling in ballots. It went viral, proliferating further after Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point, a rightwing student organization, showed it during his election live stream.

A spokesperson told USA Today the video had been misleadingly cropped; there were election observers at the end of the table and the worker was manually transcribing damaged ballots, a common and lawful practice.

“The issue comes where information can be picked up, cut, taken out of context and reframed or reinterpreted,” said Kate Starbird, associate professor at the University of Washington and cofounder of the Center for an Informed Public. “That just becomes raw material for people trying to create conspiracy theories.”

Counties can take precautions, according to Starbird, like adding the date and location on the feed. Some do this already – it was written into the Arizona law, for example, that feeds must include the date and time.

Back in Kitsap county, Andrews breathed a sigh of relief that election day operations went smoothly, but things are not quite back to normal yet. In the past, he said, election workers would take time off and go on vacation in December, after the election was certified.

But this year, Washington state is headed into a second lockdown due to a surge in coronavirus cases, and the president has yet to concede the election. So the workers may have to take advantage of a different type of streaming.

“It doesn’t sound like anybody’s going to go anywhere,” Andrews said. “Maybe their couch and Netflix.”