October 17, 2024

Countering Election Falsehoods: Lessons from the Hurricanes

By: Carrie Cordero

The wild allegations that Hurricanes Helene and Milton were somehow engineered by the government and that the FEMA response is some kind of authoritarian crackdown are just the latest examples in a long line of outlandish information circulating online about major news stories. The responses to these natural disasters—and the responses to the responses—offer important lessons for the home stretch of election 2024, which could generate more false information than any event since the COVID pandemic.

This year, as in 2020, “Election Night” may very well take more than one night—it may include days or even weeks before there is a declared winner. That period of uncertainty will be an especially important time to adopt clear messaging to counter all the bad information that will pour into the public domain, ranging from mistakes to rumors to deliberate lies.

Give people the information they need to make an informed decision, and give it to them straight.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton required the Biden administration and state and local officials to respond quickly to incorrect information and outright lunacy about federal emergency response and disaster assistance. FEMA took a page from the playbook of another agency in the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), by publishing a “Hurricane Rumor Response” page on its website. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, CISA had published a new and effective rumor-control page on its website to bat down election-security conspiracy theories and provide authoritative facts about election system mechanics and security. CISA’s updated site is on standby to correct false information that may circulate about the 2024 election.

But there is a critical difference between CISA of 2020 and FEMA of 2024. In 2020, CISA was in the nearly impossible situation of fact-checking its own out-of-control executive and his political surrogates, who were claiming that voter fraud was rampant and election systems were compromised. CISA designed and executed a strategy that effectively provided accurate information about the security of election systems in a concise, timely way.

Read the full article from The Bulwark.

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