Ballot Box Briefing: Episode 7 – Katie Harbath, Chief Global Affairs Officer, Duco Experts

The Ballot Box Briefing is a weekly segment on Sirius XM's The Briefing, that examines the issues and storylines at the heart of running an efficient and accurate election. Guests include election administrators, local, state, and federal officials, cybersecurity experts, legal analysts, and members of BPC's Democracy Program.

Katie Harbath is co-author of a new BPC survey exploring who voters trust for election-related information. On this week's Ballot Box Briefing, she delves into the survey's findings, including the prevalence of television and social media as information sources, concerns about misinformation, and Americans' confidence in the integrity of our elections.

Edited Transcript

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

STEVE SCULLY (SS):To limit the spread of inaccurate or deceptive election information, we must understand how Americans get their information to begin with, and I guess more importantly, how they feel about it. Let's begin on that point. 

KATIE HARBATH (KH):I think one of the reasons that we really wanted to redo this poll-we did it first ahead of the 2022 midterms-is there's a lot of talk about where Americans do get their news and information about elections. But there's also the question of who do they trust to be the messengers as part of all of that. I think one of the most fundamental things as we go into 2024 is really making sure that people have that trust in how elections are conducted, how the results are counted, how they're communicated, and how recounts might happen to appeal results. That entire process is something that most Americans have never been exposed to until 2020 and January 6th. So, we hope that having the sort of information that's in this poll will equip not only election officials but the media, government, and social media companies in how they can play a role in helping to educate Americans on that process. 

SS: Let me follow up on the issue of trust, because clearly in 2024 we are still living with what we saw in 2020 and a lot of questions about the election results. Based on this survey in cooperation with Morning Consult, what did you learn? 

KH: I think we learned that Americans do trust how the votes are going to be counted in their community, but they don't trust how they'll be counted elsewhere in America. 

SS:Why is that? 

KH:I think part of it is that people don't realize that every county or state might have different rules in terms of how these votes can be counted, and that's completely normal. I'm from Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's completely normal that how votes are counted in Wisconsin might be different than how they're counted in Pennsylvania. But again, most Americans don't know that. And if they're just being told that that's nefarious or wrong, they don't necessarily know who to believe. And it slowly starts to sow that distrust in the overall system. I think that we need the media, social media, and other figures to help explain and almost do "Civics 101" for people because they've never had to know these intricacies of how votes are actually counted in America. 

SS: And of course, we've never seen what happened on January 6th. I mention that because another part of the survey that really surprised me was that nearly 70% of respondents were concerned about violence and/or civil unrest. 

KH:I think that violence and civil unrest is something that people are concerned with all around the globe. Remember, elections aren't just happening here in the states. It's the biggest year of elections everywhere. After seeing January 6th, the culture in America of shootings in many cities and violence going up-people do have this concern. People are fearful of the unknown. There's a chance that this could happen because they've seen it happen in their backyard and they've seen it happen on TV. 

SS:The survey also looked at where people are getting their information. As you point out in the report, it's really an uphill battle in terms of trying to get through a very crowded social media environment. On that part, tell me what you learned. 

KH: The social media and online information environment has changed a lot since 2020. It's much more fragmented. You still have the legacy players, your Facebooks, your Instagrams, Googles, those types of platforms. 

But you also have big changes at platforms like X, formerly Twitter, where Elon Musk really slashed the trust and safety teams. You also have a lot of newer players on the field like TikTok,  where a lot of Gen Z are getting their news and information. You also have platforms like Twitch or Discord. These are messaging apps, which we found in this poll to be a popular way people are discussing politics, but they're not necessarily doing it out in the open and broadcasting it. They're doing it amongst smaller groups of people. It can be much harder to detect what's happening on these platforms, especially if they're encrypted end to end. 

So all of this means there's a lot more surfaces that researchers and others have to monitor to understand how information is flowing across these. We saw this with the Israel-Gaza conflict that started in October-a lot of mis- and -disinformation was starting on platforms like Telegram and X and then filtering to other ones. I'm trying to think about "what are the rocks we're not looking underneath?" Podcasting is becoming a lot more popular. Where are the other places that people are going to be going to try to impact the information environment that we might not be thinking of necessarily as threat factors? 

SS: Let me ask about you, your background, and how you come to this with your own personal expertise? 

KH: I've been in Washington for 20 years. I started my career doing Republican digital politics at the very beginning of the social media craze. Then I spent 10 years at Facebook where I built the teams that worked with politicians and governments on how to use the platform. I also coordinated the company's work on elections globally from 2013 through2019. I was there for everything from building our Election Day reminders, all of our integrity products such as political ad transparency, and our approaches to mis- and disinformation and foreign interference. I left Facebook in March of 2021. For a few years after that, I was a fellow here at the Bipartisan Policy Center with the Elections team, I ran my own company called Anchor Change, and started my own Substack analyzing these issues. Now I'm the Chief Global Affairs Officer at a consulting company called Duco Experts, where I get to see a real cross section across the tech industry of how different platforms are approaching these problems, including AI platforms. That is another thing that just was not around in 2020 that has now been an additional accelerant to many of these problems that we're facing here in 2024.  

SS:AI is really the big new unknown. We're just beginning to see its potential. Some of the ads that played in New Hampshire used President Biden's voice and were fakes. By all accounts, we're just beginning a whole new frontier in technology. 

KH:A lot of this reminds me of 2008, when Barack Obama was using social media for the first time in campaigning. That's where I feel like we are with AI right now. We're certainly seeing examples of AI being used in campaigns, both for very creative uses but also in nefarious ones like you mentioned. 

I'm actually more worried, though, about the narrative around AI this year and it further eroding people's trust in the information environment because of what AI could do. We had a term at Facebook called 'perception hacking,' where the bad guys don't necessarily have to do the bad thing, they just have to make you believe that they did it. So, I think as we're talking about AI, we need to be careful to separate out the signal from the noise. I suspect that we will see AI used much more in campaigning in the midterms in 2026 and-I can't believe I'm already talking about the 2028 elections-also in the 2028 elections. 

This is a field that is changing every single day. I just came back from four weeks in Silicon Valley, and it has completely changed my perspective and how we have to be approaching what we call trust and safety issues. These are the issues of how to mitigate the harms that the online environment might bring to our overall ecosystem. Today there are so many different surfaces we've never had to grapple with before, from thinking about how these models are trained, to the types of prompts that people are putting into the system, to how these prompts are outputting information. 

SS:What numbers surprised you in the BPC voter information survey? 

KH:I was disappointed to see that less people trust election officials. That number was actually much higher when we did the survey in 2022. 

I was also surprised that TV still remains popular, but then also social media was the next most popular. That's a real generational issue-people over 45 and 55 tend to trend more towards television, whereas younger generations are more in that online one. 

We did this survey in partnership with the Integrity Institute and States United. Integrity Institute is an organization of some of my former coworkers at the tech companies who've worked in this trust and safety space. In the survey, we asked questions about how people think social media companies are doing on mitigating harms. People think they could do more, but people also think that it's both the responsibility of social media companies and the government to protect people. 

SS:Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the issue of content on social media. What was your takeaway from what you heard from the justices and the questions that they posed? 

KH: My takeaway from the Supreme Court is that the justices are realizing just how hard and nuanced these questions are. They're trying to parse out the differences between the different types of online platforms. There were questions in there not just about the social media companies, but about Uber and how this might affect them. They were trying to parse out the First Amendment responsibilities of the government versus private platforms. But when private platforms promised to be a town square, do they have then an extra obligation to people? I think overall, the takeaway that people have is that it's very likely that the courts are going to continue to block these content moderation laws on First Amendment grounds. They might send it back to the lower courts. I think now the question is whether the ruling is really narrow or is it broad, and how will that impact other legislation that's happening in the state. 

SS: Katie, we are going through unchartered territory in terms of this election. What worries you the most? 

KH: First and foremost, my mantra for this year is to panic responsibly. Every day, the headlines are telling us where things are going wrong and the things that we need to be concerned about-and a lot of them are right. I'm particularly worried about deepfake audio and down-ballot races because there's less local media and less fact checkers to try to debunk that. I am worried about people continuing to sow distrust in the fundamentals of how our elections are run. To me, that's the number one thing we need to try to preserve. 

But I also have a lot of hope. I'm really glad that we're having these conversations early on about AI. We didn't do that with social media in the beginning. For 15 years, we kind of had rose colored glasses on, and then we realized the harms that could come and we've been playing catch up ever since then. So I think it is really good that these companies are taking their responsibilities seriously. They have a long way to go. It's not stuff that can be done overnight, but they're at least acknowledging it. The government is playing a role and civil society is playing a role-I think that we should recognize that that's a very good thing. We should also recognize, too, that AI is going to bring a lot of really great stuff to our lives. At least I think so. I've been having a lot of fun playing with these tools and starting to use them in my daily life. 

SS: Final question: the perception versus the reality of election results. The reality is that they are accurate. Yes, of course, minor mistakes are made, but nothing that would impact a national election. And yet there is still that perception that they are inaccurate. 

KH: The perception one is something that we need to start correcting now. I think we've seen some early results-you know, in 2022 with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with the midterms-this concept of pre-bunking, of alerting people to the types of narratives and messages that they might prove to be successful. And so, I think that starting to talk about this now-not waiting until the fall to be talking about how these elections are run and how these types of things will be conducted-the transparency from election officials will be incredibly important when the time actually comes.

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