Foreign adversaries don't need to flip a single vote to undermine an election. Sometimes, sowing confusion is enough. While election infrastructure can be hardened, voters remain vulnerable to manipulation that exploits trust and division.
In 2024, Iranian cyber actors stole private campaign materials and attempted to leak them to influence the outcome. U.S. intelligence also attributed a fabricated video showing destroyed ballots in Pennsylvania to Russian operatives. These tactics share a common goal: exploiting political divisions and eroding public confidence in the electoral process.
Artificial intelligence amplifies this threat. It makes deception cheaper, faster, and more personalized. But the danger isn't just more convincing fakes—it's also the ease with which bad actors can cast doubt on genuine evidence by claiming it was AI-generated. This phenomenon, dubbed the 'liar's dividend' by legal scholars Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron, means that as deepfakes become more common, dishonest actors gain a plausible excuse to dismiss authentic recordings or legitimate reporting.
Social engineering preys on how people think, whom they trust, and what prompts them to act. During an election, attackers have ample material: strong emotions, familiar public figures, and a constant stream of consequential information. Imagine a call that sounds like a candidate asking for an urgent donation, a text claiming your polling place has changed, or a video appearing to show an election official admitting misconduct. AI can produce convincing variations of these at scale.
Campaign staff are also targets. An attacker impersonating a colleague could use a cloned voice to request an authentication code. One successful deception could expose private communications, which might then be leaked or selectively edited to support a misleading narrative. An attack might start with a social media post, continue with a fake website, and end with a text. But seeing a claim repeated doesn't make it verified.
The deeper problem emerges when awareness of deception turns into disbelief of everything. Knowing that anything can be faked tells us about technology's capabilities, not whether a specific piece of information is falsified. Voters need practical habits to question suspicious content without assuming everything is fake.
First, pause when a message pushes you to act. Urgency, outrage, and fear deserve extra scrutiny. Before donating, sharing, or changing your voting plans, verify the request through a separate channel. Second, look for independent confirmation. Several accounts repeating the same clip may all rely on one unverified source. Seek credible reporting that establishes the information's origin.
Third, go directly to the relevant authority. Verify registration, polling locations, and deadlines with your state or local election office. For campaign communications, navigate to the campaign's known website rather than following an unsolicited link. An official campaign statement establishes what the campaign says, while independent reporting helps assess the claim. Finally, be comfortable saying, 'I don't know yet.' You don't owe every viral post an immediate verdict. Waiting for evidence is responsible, even when a claim supports your political preferences.
But voters can't bear the burden alone. Campaigns should secure their accounts, keep original communications accessible, and respond quickly to impersonation attempts. Platforms need effective reporting and escalation processes for deceptive election content. Nonprofits like Defending Digital Campaigns provide eligible campaigns with cybersecurity resources, and my organization supports them as a technology partner.
AI also has a defensive role. The same technology that enables attackers can help defenders identify malicious infrastructure, connect coordinated activity across channels, and disrupt campaigns before they spread. But technology alone won't solve the trust problem. As synthetic content becomes easier to produce, we need to make authentic information easier to verify—giving voters reliable places to confirm what campaigns and election officials have actually said, and responding quickly to impersonation.
The danger is not simply that AI will make people believe something false. It's that repeated exposure to manipulation will make them question whether anything can be trusted at all. Election security must address both threats. Protecting the vote means protecting the systems that count it, but also preserving voters' ability to know what is real.
Bobby Ford is chief strategy officer at Doppel.
