Staying Safe While Voting
In the recent 2020 elections, many people didn’t believe that the
election was safe, and were worried about interference from other countries.
They thought that they wouldn’t be able to get reliable information that was
true in order to be able to vote. Russia might have been able to influence the
votes a lot because of this. They caused the Americans to doubt the safety of
voting, which caused less people overall to vote. In the 2020 election, though,
America implemented different election security systems, and they also made
different jurisdictions, but they still weren’t able to release any kind of
security patch to fix every system, so nothing was completely safe.
Russia Interferes With 2016 Presidential Elections
During the 2016 presidential elections, Russia attempted
to influence the voting to increase the odds of one of the candidates
winning. Although Russia did not ever change any of the votes during
the election, they did steal hundreds of thousands of voters’s personal
information and influenced many of the votes through social media.
Their overall goal was to make the Clinton campaign look worse, and increase
Trump’s chances of being elected president. Hackers stole information on
500,000 voters from a state’s website, including names, addresses, parts
of voters’ Social Security numbers, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers.
Furthermore, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report said that in a small
number of states, Russians were able to access sensitive and restricted parts
of the election infrastructure, and would have been able to change or delete
registration data of the voters if they wanted.
Russia's Influence on Social Media
Russia’s influence on social media started before the 2016 elections,
in 2014. A Russian troll farm, called the Internet Research Agency promoted and
posted propaganda and targeted voters with posts and messages. This agency was much
like an internet marketer, and used the same tools and techniques that are used in
digital advertising. Another organization used a “hack and leak” technique, where
they would hack places like the Democratic National Committee and Hilary Clinton’s
campaign to leak information to journalists. Later, in 2018, Russians were able to
capitalize more on discussing topics that were already dividing the nations,
instead of creating false facts.
