News Clips

The nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, which monitors social media for voter suppression efforts, said that Twitter took no action on high-profile posts that the organization flagged on Tuesday as problematic. Common Cause said Twitter posts from Republican candidates Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kari Lake should have included warning labels under the company's civic integrity policy, which governs misleading tweets about elections. Posts by Greene and Lake drew tens of thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. Common Cause also noted a "big slowdown" in Twitter's response time since Friday, when layoffs gutted many of the company's teams responsible for elevating credible information. "Twitter is hopeless and not responding beyond replying that they are looking into something and then going dark on it for days," the group said, noting that the company's response time was normally about one to three hours. Also drawing engagement were posts baselessly warning voters that Wi-Fi networks at polling locations could enable hacking of voting machines, Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, told a news briefing. The falsehoods appeared to originate on messaging app Telegram before spreading to more mainstream social media services, according to Common Cause. A Reuters review found examples on Twitter, TikTok and Meta's (META.O) Facebook.

“We have never certified an election on election night,” said Sylvia Albert, director of elections for Common Cause, a non-profit group that has been tracking election misinformation. “This is nothing new. It’s just people trying to undermine faith in elections.”

“There are attempts to use those election administration and voting machine issues that election workers are working to fix to spin a disinformation campaign,” said Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at Common Cause, which advocates for voting access.

Common Cause, a pro-democracy advocacy group, said this week that it had flagged several tweets pushing false narratives, such as that election results not announced on Tuesday night are a sign of fraud. The group said that “it has taken Twitter much longer than normal to adjudicate” whether the posts violated its policies, a process that usually takes less than three hours but was unresolved after more than three days.

"What we are seeing are things that we usually see on Election Day," Susannah Goodman, director of election security for Common Cause, told reporters. "There are glitches in the system, but election administrators have learned from the past and they have resiliency built in." ... And then there were issues that voting rights groups described as "weird."   A priest in Toledo was unexpectedly checking the identification of voters, said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause of Ohio. In Summit County, home to Akron, a man was seen observing polling places before being asked to move along. Katya Ehresman, an organizer for Common Cause of Texas, said there were a handful of incidents of alleged voter intimidation within 100 feet of polling locations, but the problem wasn't widespread. She said there was "overwhelming enthusiasm" for voting statewide. "I'm really excited about the turnout we are seeing," Ehresman said.

But Suzanne Almeida, director of state operations for Common Cause, said late Tuesday that monitors were relieved by how quiet the day had been. “I am happy to report that today has been relatively quiet on the political violence front,” she told reporters late Tuesday. “We were absolutely prepared for more significant incidents, but they simply have not come to fruition.”