While speaking onstage in Phoenix earlier this month, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was asked what keeps him up at night—a question he faces so often that he joked it was “the center block on my bingo card” for conversations about the upcoming U.S. election.
But his answer was serious.
While speaking onstage in Phoenix earlier this month, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was asked what keeps him up at night—a question he faces so often that he joked it was “the center block on my bingo card” for conversations about the upcoming U.S. election.
But his answer was serious.
“What keeps me up at night is that we still have elected officials and candidates in this country who will purposefully lie because of grift or because of some kind of political advantage that they think they’re going to get,” Fontes told an audience at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University (ASU). “Most of this corrosive information originates outside of the United States, but it’s amplified by domestic actors.”
Fontes even has a shorthand for the primary sources of that disinformation. “I call them the RIChis—Russia, Iran, China,” he said in an interview with Foreign Policy. “Those folks are keenly interested in Americans being divided against one another.”
U.S. intelligence and cyber defense officials have repeatedly said that Washington’s three biggest adversaries are all working in parallel to interfere with November’s presidential election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Last Friday, a joint statement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the FBI blamed Russia for a fake social media video that showed a poll worker in Pennsylvania destroying mail-in ballots.
Microsoft echoed those warnings in a recent report, laying out influence efforts by Iran and Russia targeting the Trump and Harris campaigns, respectively. It also found that China is focusing more on down-ballot candidates and congressional races—though the New York Times reported that Chinese hackers have also accessed data from phones used by Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
The ODNI cautioned last week that election interference is unlikely to stop when polls close on Nov. 5, with Russia and Iran seeking to sow chaos and even foment violence in the days after the vote.
That fraught post-election period is also what Fontes and his colleagues are most worried about, given what they went through in 2020. Arizona was the prime target of election deniers linked to the “Stop the Steal” movement, who—along with Trump himself—accused election authorities in the state and its largest county, Maricopa, of voter fraud after Joe Biden’s victory there. Legal cases, misinformation, and even threats of violence followed, but in the end, a Republican-funded review of the Maricopa County election results failed to come up with any additional votes for Trump; in fact, it found the opposite, adding 99 votes to Biden’s tally and 261 fewer votes for Trump.
Throughout it all, the officials in charge held firm—sometimes at great personal cost. Just ask Bill Gates.
No, not that Bill Gates. As a supervisor of Maricopa County—the United States’ fourth-largest county with more than 4.5 million people—Gates was one of the officials who faced the brunt of the misinformation and resulting harassment in the aftermath of the last presidential election. His family received death threats, and he has spoken out about his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result. This will be his last election before he retires and joins ASU to help run the university’s new Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory.
Gates said he and his colleagues don’t actively think about where the misinformation they’re seeing comes from. “It looks like it’s pretty much all from within the United States, and it is only when we’re reminded by these news stories that there is this foreign interference,” he said. “That’s when I would say we start to think about it, but it is very well hidden.”
Both Gates and Fontes expressed cautious confidence about their preparations this time around. They have had four years to prepare for every eventuality, and the 2022 midterm elections provided additional experience and lessons.
“I think the attacks against our election systems have become more sophisticated, both on the technical side but also in the legal attacks that we anticipate could be mounted after the election, and so we’ve double- and triple-checked our teams to make sure that we’re planning for scenarios and playing out how those things are going to work,” said Fontes, who was the Maricopa County recorder during the 2020 election but was elected into his current office in the 2022 midterms. “Our defenses are certainly much more robust than they were in 2022 or 2020.”
Those defenses start in the physical realm, with Maricopa’s Tabulation and Election Center now protected by iron gates, fences, shatterproof glass, armed guards, and mandatory badge access. But they are also increasingly focused on the digital. After taking office as Arizona’s secretary of state, Fontes hired Michael Moore as the office’s first dedicated chief information security officer; Moore previously held a similar role in Maricopa. Moore’s team is bolstered by partnerships with the National Guard and an interagency body called the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center.
“While there’s always a possibility that somebody will break through the wall, we’ve built it pretty solidly, and I feel pretty good about it,” Fontes said.
Fontes has also taken steps to reckon with the relatively new threat posed by artificial intelligence. In June, he set up an AI and election security advisory committee that was comprised of more than a dozen academics, experts, and representatives from Microsoft and OpenAI. He has also organized training sessions and tabletop exercises for election and law enforcement officials, which he described as “Dungeons & Dragons for election nerds.”
Many of those exercises used deepfake audio and video of state officials, including Fontes himself, to prepare election workers for what they might see. One such video, shown before he took the stage in Phoenix, depicted him speaking French and German—languages he does not speak. “There’s been a lot of deepfakes made of me recently, but I am actually here,” Fontes said.
Gates oversees a relatively smaller domain but arguably faces a brighter spotlight. “We literally receive billions of attacks on the Maricopa County cyber infrastructure every quarter,” he said, adding that the county regularly engages with federal agencies such as the CISA and FBI. “We know each other now, it isn’t [that] if something goes wrong we’ll introduce ourselves.”
Many of the scenarios his team is preparing for are now known unknowns rather than the unknown unknowns they previously might have been. “We ran a safe and secure election in 2020, but we were certainly not prepared for what would come in the aftermath, or the disinformation that came that we had to deal with in real time in addition to the physical threat,” Gates said. Even AI “is not really that unique, it’s just another flavor of misinformation on steroids.”
Both officials are also optimistic that their citizens are more aware and informed, and they hope that the heightened awareness and conversation around election misinformation, both foreign and domestic, will blunt its effect over the next few weeks and beyond. “Honestly, I think people are getting tired of that stuff, just generally speaking,” Fontes said. “I think folks realize that the bulk of evidence leans toward the veracity of our system, toward the legitimacy of our system. And we continue to welcome the questioning.”
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