Completely mired in disinformation

Scarred by 2020 smears, voting companies and election officials brace for November

By Marshall Cohen

Weeks before the 2022 midterms, a stranger showed up at the Denver headquarters of Dominion Voting Systems. He didn’t have an appointment, so the front desk asked him to leave. But staffers noticed him lingering outside, and one Dominion executive spotted a rifle case and scope in his vehicle.

A week later, the man returned, rambling about supposed problems with election security. He then said he had a pistol in his car. Alarmed, Dominion staff got the police involved and later obtained a restraining order.

The episode, described in court filings and by a senior Dominion official who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity, is part of the continued fallout from 2020 election lies. The impact has been acutely felt at Dominion, the voting technology company that became the poster child for baseless right-wing voter fraud claims in 2020.

The avalanche of disinformation forced voting companies and election officials to overhaul their approach for 2024, according to interviews with nearly a dozen people involved in running the election. They’ve ramped up investments in physical security, found new ways to combat false claims, and cracked down on employees’ political postings.

Yet, more than one year after Fox News paid Dominion $787 million, the largest known defamation settlement in US media history, former President Donald Trump and his allies are still flooding right-wing media with the lie that voting machine companies rigged the 2020 election, and that the 2024 election might be stolen too.

Even as they adapt for 2024, some people involved in administering elections still fear for their lives. There has been an exodus of election workers who have quit or retired instead of putting up with the abuse for another cycle. Just this week, the Justice Department announced charges against a Colorado man who threatened to kill election officials in two states for committing “treason.”

Multiple Dominion employees have quit because of the stress and psychological impact of the post-2020 chaos and the increasing security risks, the senior Dominion official said.

“If a car pulls up to my house, I always look twice,” the senior Dominion official said about the aftermath of the security incidents at his office. “I’ve never done that before. We have a lot of windows, and if someone stops in front, I’ll inspect what’s going on.”

‘Completely mired in disinformation’

Before 2020, companies including Dominion, Smartmatic, and Election Systems & Software, which sell voting machines and software for US elections, were not household names.

As Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he and his allies such as Rudy Giuliani, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and the late Fox News personality Lou Dobbs, focused many of their false claims of fraud at voting machine companies, making those companies infamous in MAGA country.

”Before the lies about recent elections, spread by losing candidates, those vendors were largely anonymous, known only to regulators and election officials,” said David Becker, an election industry expert who advises officials from both political parties.

What used to be boring, and seemingly anonymous, portions of the country’s elections infrastructure are now at the forefront of the political disinformation wars. Smartmatic is also suing many of these same Trump allies, and its trial against conservative channel Newsmax is scheduled for next month.

The impact of 2020 has trickled down to the local level.

Last year, a conservative northern California county ended its Dominion contract early, citing issues of “voter trust.” Officials in one Ohio county tried to cut ties after an uproar from local Trump voters. And a right-wing sheriff in western Michigan is still using his office to hunt for supposed 2020 fraud and to peddle anti-Dominion conspiracies.

“It is incredibly different this time around,” the senior Dominion official told CNN. “We are still completely mired in disinformation. This disinformation and misinformation is something we’ve never had to deal with before at this scale going into an election.”

Dominion, whose products are used in 27 states, is responding to “exponentially” more inquiries than ever before from election officials – emails, official letters, and phone calls – often related to their constituents’ unfounded concerns about 2020, the senior official said.

Over the summer as the 2024 campaign ramped up, Dominion CEO John Poulos personally met with election officials in multiple states to help dispel the disinformation, CNN has learned.

The Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency founded after the 2000 recount, released a series of videos last month with training for how local officials should talk to the public around the upcoming election. Their recommendations almost read like a crash course in crisis communications, with an emphasis on speed and transparency.

“People are hearing these conspiracies and adopting them into their own experiences, and they think this stuff is happening to them,” Barb Byrum, a Democrat who has served as the county clerk in Ingham County, Michigan, since 2013, told CNN in an interview.

Ingham County, which is home to Lansing, uses Dominion machines, Byrum said.

‘Invasive’ social media crackdown

After 2020, Trump supporters started investigating and doxing people that they wrongly believed were involved in rigging the results. Many were Dominion and Smartmatic employees who were never in the public eye.

The poster child for this phenomenon is Eric Coomer, Dominion’s former director of strategy and security, who was singled out at the infamous November 2020 news conference where Giuliani and others spewed unhinged theories about the election.

“This Coomer character… took off all of his social media, but we kept it,” Giuliani declared, setting off a wave of doxing from an army of online right-wing sleuths who circulated Coomer’s anti-Trump postings, publicized his home address, and more.

This led Coomer, who left Dominion after 2020, to file defamation lawsuits against the Trump campaign, Giuliani, and others. He claimed his once-sterling reputation was “irreparably tarnished” and that he “can no longer work in the elections industry.” That litigation is ongoing.

An even larger voting company, Election Systems & Software, or ES&S, whose products are used in more than 1,500 jurisdictions across the country, was spared from the 2020 smears. But it’s learning a lesson from what happened to Coomer and took a drastic step earlier this year, by forcing its staffers to undergo a social media “background check” to screen for any political posts, according to three former employees who spoke to CNN.

These former employees said this didn’t happen in previous election cycles.

One ex-employee of ES&S who identifies as conservative said the directive came as a “big surprise” and caused “quite a kerfuffle” – and that concerns were raised to executives. A second former ES&S employee who identifies as liberal said the background checks “freaked a lot of people out” and felt like an “invasive violation” of their free-speech rights.

“There was definitely a chilling effect,” a third former ES&S employee said.

The stated goal of the social media crackdown was to make sure employees didn’t have any publicly accessible posts that “would jeopardize ES&S’ public or customer relations,” according to an internal memo reviewed by CNN.

ES&S spokeswoman Katina Granger confirmed that the company did the social media scrubs this year. She said ES&S has long prohibited employees from endorsing political candidates or parties “in a way that could compromise the important political neutrality of ES&S,” which is “a primary tenant for those who support elections.”

“As has recently become the norm for most employers, ES&S has included social media reviews for all new hires in addition to regular background checks,” Granger said in the statement. “Earlier this year, ES&S made a business decision to ask our employees to undergo the same social media review as is part of our standard hiring practice.”

Granger also said ES&S has stepped up physical security and “enhanced” its digital protections, with more training and testing to combat cyberattacks targeting employees. Two senior ES&S officials told CNN they brought in the Department of Homeland Security to review their internal cybersecurity measures.

‘Panic buttons’ for election workers

Dominion staffers are still being doxed and threatened, according to its lawyers.

The threats spiked in the spring, when three prominent election deniers, including ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, orchestrated the leak of thousands of internal Dominion documents, and falsely claimed they revealed a Serbian-based plot to manipulate the 2020 results.

The judge overseeing Dominion’s defamation case against Byrne recently concluded that these leaks “led to serious threats to Dominion and its employees.” Byrne denies wrongdoing.

Dominion is also shadowboxing outside of court with these prominent 2020 election deniers.

In June, one of Byrne’s self-proclaimed “operatives” unexpectedly showed up at the building where Poulos, the Dominion CEO, was being deposed, according to court filings. The operative filmed their encounter, which Byrne quickly posted online, leading to more vitriol from his fans.

Dominion has boosted its investments on physical security, though officials wouldn’t reveal specifics. A spokesperson for Smartmatic – whose software was only used in  Los Angeles County in 2020, and is still only there for 2024 – declined to discuss security spending.

“When I started my career in the elections industry, they didn’t need to give you training about what to do if you’re sent poisonous materials in the mail,” the senior Dominion official said.

Last year, before Thanksgiving, ES&S offered an in-house training session for employees, advising them on how to respond to family and friends at the dinner table when they are inevitably peppered with questions about election security, according to two senior ES&S officials.

The increased harassment has also spilled over to the thousands of election officials who are closest to the voters, on the local level, CNN previously reported. An Arizona-based company that specializes in ballot printing recently branched out to provide election offices with wearable “panic buttons” that call the police with one touch.

A spokeswoman for the company, Runbeck Election Services, said the new product “was a reaction to what we’ve seen in 2020,” and that the company is in talks with officials in at least five states to deploy potentially 1,500 of its badges in the fall.

‘Death by a thousand papercuts’

In addition to the physical harassment, suspicious letters, and “swatting” attacks targeting election workers, troublemakers have found other creative ways to disrupt election administration.

Byrum, the county clerk in Lansing, has seen a major increase in voters using the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, to request information about the 2020 election. Others call her office, and Byrum has started to wonder if “they’re just trying to keep me on the phone and take up my time.” Byrum suspects it may be an organized effort.

“We’re receiving death by a thousand papercuts,” Byrum said. “It’s not so much about truly seeking public information, but rather about directing our resources away from election administration, and toward the requirements of fulfilling the FOIA requests.”

In the five years before the 2020 election, Byrum’s office averaged less than three major FOIA requests per year that required special attention, according to data provided to CNN. That rose to 21 requests in 2020, and spiked to 53 requests in 2022, according to the data, which show that her office already received 10 major FOIA requests this year.

The Election Assistance Commission says “flooding elections offices” with FOIAs is a national problem after 2020, and circulated advice to local officials for how to handle it.

“It is nice to see more people interested in elections,” Byrum said. “More eyeballs are welcomed. But bad-faith actors are not. It’s heartbreaking to see these bad-faith actors attacking election administrators and the process, and the integrity of our elections.”