The period immediately following the U.S. Election Day on 5 November 2024, is widely regarded as the most volatile and potentially destabilising phase of the electoral process.
This was highlighted in a compelling episode of Justin Hendrix’s Tech Policy Press podcast, where he interviewed three experts, including Katie Harbath, Nicole Schneidman and Dean Jackson. For those interested in understanding the crucial dates, activities, and issues to watch post-Election Day, this episode is highly recommended listening.
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From the vantage point of a young democracy like South Africa with a modern constitution and an independent electoral management system, the US’s ageing electoral infrastructure appears particularly susceptible to bad-faith actors at the county, state, and congressional levels.
‘Big Lie’
It is crucial to clarify that the US system is not especially prone to widespread electoral fraud, contrary to the narrative promoted by the MAGA “Big Lie”. Instead, the real concern lies in the potential for election denialists to interfere with election administration.
One individual, David Clements, has been conducting “religiously inspired” trainings across the U.S., instructing citizens on how to prevent local election officials from certifying results they deem fraudulent.
This unsettling trend was detailed in an article by a Lawfare senior editor, Anna Bower who attended one of Clements’ sessions firsthand, and by Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare’s editor-in-chief, who interviewed Clements.
Additionally, there is a podcast on the same issue featuring Bower, Wittes and senior editor Roger Parloff, where they discuss Bower and Wittes’s observations in depth.
Bower reports that, The trainees had been instructed that American elections are rigged and that they are battling a “spiritual war” against election fraud. They had been told that they could resist “tyranny” by showing up en masse to pressure local officials to withhold certification of voting machines or election results.
“And at this climactic moment, at the direction of a former business law professor named David Clements, they were role-playing large-scale civil disobedience at a local elections meeting, crowding around a fellow comrade-in-arms to physically block law enforcement from removing her from a public meeting at which she was filibustering.
‘Articulate mob’
“Later, Clements assured trainees that this is the only way to fight back: “You have to create a righteous, sober-minded, well-spoken, articulate mob, if you will, because that’s the only thing that will work short of where we’re headed, which is a kinetic civil war—if we don’t get this resolved peacefully.”
One can therefore expect false claims of fraudulent voting machines and election results to emerge across the country at the local and county level from 5 November onwards.
Added to this are threats against election officials with Schneidman confirming that, in terms of a survey by the Brennan Centre:
“38% of election officials say, in their day in and day out work of being an election official in this country, they’re experiencing threats, harassments, and the potential for violence.”
How will the platforms deal with online threats to election officials and amplified election denialism in the next two months?
Harbath says: “Not all the platforms are equal. I think we need to put X in its own category. Same thing with ones like Truth Social, Telegram, versus those like Meta, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, OpenAI, a vast majority who do have large teams who continue to work on this stuff”.
Trust and safety
Despite significant resource cutbacks, there are still dedicated professionals at the major platforms working on trust and safety issues. TikTok reportedly stands out with particularly thorough policies—likely an effort to bolster its credibility as it challenges a potential U.S. ban in court.
However, it remains to be seen how content moderation teams will handle an unprecedented wave of election-related mis- and disinformation, which could directly fuel civil unrest in the months ahead.
Election denialists, like David Clements, have had four years to strategise for “running interference” and it remains uncertain whether platforms, election administrators and US law enforcement are fully prepared for what lies ahead.
In August 2021 Michael Markovitz was appointed to head up the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) Media Leadership Think Tank – an independent research and advocacy platform dealing with the pressing issues facing the media and audiovisual industries and how these impact on democracy. In 2017 Markovitz was appointed by Parliament to the Board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) for a five year term. He completed his term on 15 October 2022. Markovitz has also been recognised by Rhodes University’s Journalism and Media Studies school as one of their top 50 alumni in the 50 years since the school’s founding in 1972.
