By Nick Corasaniti and Davey Alba, New York Times
Like so many modern election sagas, it started with a tweet.
In 2019, Jena Griswold, the newly installed secretary of state in Colorado, saw a tweet falsely claiming that her state’s election system had been hacked, using a picture of voting equipment as evidence.
“It wasn’t equipment that we even use in the state of Colorado,” Ms. Griswold, a Democrat, said. Though her office was able to contact Twitter and take the tweet down within an hour, the flare-up was yet another reminder of just how pervasive election misinformation had become since the 2016 presidential election.
To prevent deceptive tweets, doctored videos and other forms of misinformation from undermining Colorado’s elections, Ms. Griswold is starting a new initiative that will run ads on social media and expand digital outreach to help voters identify foreign misinformation.
The operation in Colorado comes as Ms. Griswold and other secretaries of state are bracing for a deluge of misinformation about voting as Election Day draws closer, forced to defend a decentralized election system that has shown a particular weakness to the impact of rumors and outright lies.