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Tag: 2024 election

  • Scenes From a Battleground Philadelphia Suburb on Election Day

    Scenes From a Battleground Philadelphia Suburb on Election Day

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    Pennsylvania Is the essential battleground state for the 2024 election: Whoever wins here will likely be in the White House next year. We spent time today in Warrington Township, a suburb of Philadelphia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. What we saw was a town divided. Signs reading “Communists” and “Fascists” plaster the streets, illustrating a tale of two Americas at odds with one another.

    As a contentious election season finally comes to a close, we saw a desperate plea from this small community, people of all political persuasions pushing their messages before time runs out. It’s still too early to say where this state will land. But we do know that whatever the result, the division that occurred along the way may be hard to repair.

    Signs supporting Trump are seen along the road outside Buck County Doylestown Pennsylvania.

    Signs supporting Trump are seen along the road outside Buck County Doylestown, Pennsylvania.Photograph: Alex Kent

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  • Groypers Gave Illegal Hot Dogs and Burgers to Trump Voters

    Groypers Gave Illegal Hot Dogs and Burgers to Trump Voters

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    Mesa, AZ — A group of America First groypers, college Republicans, and a Christian nationalist pastor were handing out burgers and hot dogs to voters in Phoenix on Tuesday—but only if they voted for former president Donald Trump.

    The cookout took place about 100 yards from a polling station—and it was likely illegal.

    The effort was organized by the far-right College Republicans United group, in association with the Patriot Party of Arizona. It began just after polls opened at the Mesa Convention Center. Groypers, the name that followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes give themselves, were helping hand out hot dogs, burgers, and cold drinks. Manning the grill was Pastor David MacLellan, a Christian nationalist pastor who is the chaplain for the Patriot Party of Arizona and subscribes to the extremist ideology of the Black Robe Regiment.

    “We’re giving away hot dogs and hamburgers to folks who are doing the right thing, voting for Trump,” MacLellan tells WIRED.

    Isaiah, a self-identified groyper who would not provide his last name, confirmed that the group was only giving out food to Trump voters, but added: “[The food is] specifically for Trump voters, but we do welcome others if they do want to come over and change their mind.”

    Providing food for a specific group of people at a polling location is in breach of federal law.

    “Not only is it illegal to give just to voters for one candidate, one cannot limit it only to voters. it must be made available to all people in the area, including children and others ineligible to vote, to avoid running afoul of federal law against vote buying,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, tells WIRED, citing the same rules that Elon Musk was accused of breaching with his $1 million ballot.

    The Arizona Secretary of State’s office, which sets the rules for behavior at polling locations, did not respond to a request for comment.

    The College Republican United group was set up in 2018 by Rick Thomas, who is also a member of the Patriot Party of Arizona. Thomas told WIRED he founded the group out of frustration at the Republican student group that was in place at Arizona State University.

    “We eventually broke off and formed our own organization that was very pro-Trump,” Thomas said. “We are American first, we are MAGA.”

    While not all members of College Republican United are members of Fuentes’ group, there is a significant overlap, Isaiah told WIRED.

    Thomas portrayed the group as a relatively mainstream student group, but evidence online indicates otherwise: The College Republican United’s website’s book recommendations page features two deeply antisemitic works: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.

    Another member of the CRU, Kevin Decuyper, was recently hired as an aide to former far-right sheriff Joe Arpaio,

    “There are reasons why College Republicans United have been denounced by so many GOP organizations,” says Nick Martin, an investigative journalist who closely tracks extremist groups in Arizona and who runs the online publication The Informant. “The organization recommends its members read discredited and debunked books filled with racist pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Their guest speakers have included white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Pizzagate peddlers, fringe political candidates and, rarely, some actual Republicans.”

    You can follow all of WIRED’s 2024 presidential election coverage here.

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  • Will Social Platforms Take Down a Premature Donald Trump Victory Post?

    Will Social Platforms Take Down a Premature Donald Trump Victory Post?

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    One of the big questions going into election night is whether former president Donald Trump will prematurely declare victory. That declaration would likely be accompanied by social media posts on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok—all of which will not confirm if they would remove the content.

    He’s done it before: Trump falsely declared himself the winner of the 2020 election when many battleground states were still too close to call. Counts were still ongoing in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A number of Republican lawmakers and pundits rebuked Trump’s claims. Ben Shapiro, cofounder of the Daily Wire, said “No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say that he has,” in an X post at the time. Trump’s own advisers are reportedly encouraging him to announce an early victory.

    “Premature claims of victory that are intended to intimidate people from voting or suppress voting may be evaluated under our Civic Integrity policy,” X spokesperson Michael Abboud tells WIRED. “ Community Notes are an effective way to add helpful context to Posts that may be misleading about voting results.”

    X authorizes users to flag and correct misinformation on its platforms through Community Notes. A recent Center for Countering Digital Hate study found that the crowdsourced fact-checking initiative does a poor job of correcting false election claims.

    X, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has already become a hotbed for election misinformation and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. Last week, Musk’s America PAC launched an Election Integrity Community on X which has grown to nearly 50,000 members. The group says it will elevate “incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.

    In 2020, Meta said that it would add labels to early victory posts. This time around, Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson, shared a blog post with WIRED explaining that the company will remove misinformation related to the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting and voting-related calls for violence. Meta will also remove content containing false election results, according to the blog post, but Chambliss did not respond to whether that rule applied to Trump.

    “As with all of our policies we will continue to monitor what we’re seeing on-platform,” Chambliss told WIRED on Tuesday.

    Ads declaring a false outcome, however, are banned. Meta bans new election ads for the week before election day, and said it would extend that ban up until a few days after polls close, Axios reported on Monday.

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  • Russia Is Going All Out on Election Day Interference

    Russia Is Going All Out on Election Day Interference

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    As the 2024 US presidential election comes to a close, and with Donald Trump on the ballot once again, Russian actors are spreading disinformation with unprecedented and alarming intensity—and US officials say that the Kremlin’s efforts to undermine confidence in the election and foment unrest are likely to continue into January.

    Russian disinformation operations have had a prominent presence in United States elections since the Kremlin’s sea-changing influence campaign during the 2016 presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Trump. But with so much scrutiny and investigation into that operation’s mechanics and impact—including the use of hack-and-leak tactics against the Democratic National Committee, Clinton campaign, and other targets—Russia was less technically aggressive and more focused on influence operations in the midterms and 2020 presidential election. That momentary respite is now over.

    In calls with reporters on Monday night and Tuesday, as well as in public statements, US intelligence and law enforcement officials working on election security warned repeatedly that foreign influence actors including Iran, but “particularly Russia,” are ramping up their activity with an “increasing volume of inauthentic content online.” And while officials say they haven’t detected cyberattacks beyond floods of junk traffic, or DDoS attacks, attempting to knock election-related sites offline, Russian activity has become increasingly menacing.

    On Tuesday morning, for example, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger attributed multiple bomb threats against two Georgia polling places to Russia. The threats were deemed non-credible, but they briefly disrupted voting at the two poll sites. The FBI added later on Tuesday that poll sites in “several states” faced non-credible bomb threats that appeared to “originate from Russian email domains.”

    “It is a greater scope and scale of foreign influence operations we have seen in 2024 than in prior cycles, and yes, Russia presents, in terms of our adversaries, the greatest degree of capability and sophistication,” Cait Conley, senior adviser to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told reporters in a call on Tuesday afternoon. “Overall, I think the range of tactics we are seeing being employed, and the level of sophistication, is greater than prior cycles.”

    In a joint statement on Monday evening, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, CISA, and the FBI emphasized that “Russia is the most active threat” to the US election. “Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences,” they wrote.

    The agencies cited some specific examples of content from Russian influence campaigns. One was a fake interview with someone purporting to be a former aide to Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes, claiming a vast election fraud campaign involving the manufacture of fake overseas ballots. Another involved alleged Russian influence actors amplifying an article that falsely claimed US officials in swing states were committing election fraud using a variety of tactics, including ballot stuffing and cyberattacks.

    A video claiming to show evidence of fraud in Georgia was also linked to “Russian influence actors” in late September. Last month, experts also credited Russia-aligned propaganda network Storm-1516 with amplifying baseless claims that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz previously assaulted one of his former students.

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  • An Election Denial Group Has Spent Months Compiling ‘Suspicious Voter’ Lists in North Carolina

    An Election Denial Group Has Spent Months Compiling ‘Suspicious Voter’ Lists in North Carolina

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    In response to a request for comment, Richards tells WIRED that EagleAI Network “has no relationships with entities” and, rather, “is used by individuals.”

    “We do not ask people whether they work with groups,” Richards says.

    The NCEIT is affiliated with the nationwide Election Integrity Network (EIN), whose members allege without evidence that the US is plagued with voter fraud. The EIN was created by Cleta Mitchell, Donald Trump’s former lawyer who was present on the 2020 phone call in which Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him nearly 12,000 votes.

    When EagleAI Network was created in the wake of the 2020 election, it reportedly received legal assistance and strategy advice from Mitchell—though Richards has insisted that Mitchell has no “official relationship” with EagleAI Network. The company has courted contracts with public election boards in at least three states (Georgia, Texas, and West Virginia), and it has data about voters that have recently moved from at least nine states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas), but the total number of states EagleAI Network has been used in is unclear. Notably, North Carolina is absent from both publicly available lists.

    The NCEIT’s campaign to target “suspicious voters” could disproportionately impact Hispanic people. Jim Womack, NCEIT founder and president and Lee County Republican Party chair, said in a recent video obtained by CBS News that when generating suspicious voter lists, NCEIT members should target people with “Hispanic-sounding” last names.

    “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information … and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” Womack says in the video. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal. It just means they’re suspicious.”

    The emails don’t detail exactly how the “suspicious voter” tool from EagleAI Network works. However, the company’s tool for automating voter registration challenges, a similar process, is well documented. While voter registration challenges have to be filed no fewer than 90 days before an election, voter challenges can be filed up to five days after an election in North Carolina.

    EagleAI Network’s tool for filing voter registration challenges essentially centralizes the process. It allows users to search for people who they suspect have issues or mistakes in their voter registrations, using data from a combination of public and private sources. A search could surface voters who, say, live at a particular address, or share demographics like age.

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  • Arizona’s Kari Lake Is Already Claiming Election Fraud

    Arizona’s Kari Lake Is Already Claiming Election Fraud

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    This year, Lake has also pushed conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots and early voting, demanding a single day of in-person voting. Her support for early and mail-in voting on the eve of the election echoes the flip-flopping from former president Donald Trump, who has also realized that without early and mail-in voting he does not have a chance to win.

    Lake may have changed her mind on the veracity of mail-in ballots, but she remains convinced that the election will be stolen. The only solution? “We’re going to make it too big to rig,” Lake told her supporters.

    Throughout her Senate campaign, Lake has repeatedly refused to answer a simple question: Would she be willing to accept the results of the election?

    Polling suggests that Lake could be about to face another loss, and based on her remarks throughout the campaign, it is unlikely that Lake, who will still not concede she lost in 2022, will be willing to graciously concede.

    Ultimately, Lake took her challenge to court, and lost again. Undeterred, Lake continued to ingratiate herself with Trump and MAGA, and was even considered as a possible vice presidential candidate.

    Now, Lake has claimed it would be foolish to commit to accepting election results without knowing what those results are.

    Kari Lake's supporters in Prescott Arizona.

    Kari Lake’s supporters in Prescott, Arizona.

    Photograph: Jamie Lee Taete

    Many of her supporters who spoke to WIRED on Monday night agreed with Lake, convinced there was fraud afoot in the election already.

    “I don’t think we should accept anything until we know that the election is an honest election. We know the last one was rigged and the 2020 one was rigged,” Sandy, a Lake supporter from Prescott Valley, tells WIRED.

    But there were also some supporters who urged their candidate to do the right thing and concede if she was defeated.

    “We’ve got no choice, we’ve got to accept the results,” says Rick Starmer, from Chino Valley in Yavapai County.

    Kari Lake has made immigration a key issue of her Senate campaign.

    Kari Lake has made immigration a key issue of her Senate campaign.

    Photograph: Jamie Lee Taete

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  • TikTok Employees Shrug Off the US Election

    TikTok Employees Shrug Off the US Election

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    TikTok is one of the tech companies that could be most impacted by the outcome of the US elections. But as the election result looms, employees there found themselves surprisingly disengaged from the high-level political drama that could decide the app’s fate.

    A San Jose-based product manager, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, says he was more worried about the TikTok ban before he joined the company earlier this year than now. He claims his colleagues rarely bring up the topic, and his team plans future product features in the app as if there’s no ban taking place soon.

    “I feel indifferent now,” he says. “There’s little you can do as an ordinary employee, and everyone thinks that way, so the result is business as usual.”

    WIRED talked to half a dozen employees at TikTok and its parent company ByteDance on the condition of anonymity, and all of them report very little, if any, discussion of US elections or politics among their ranks.

    While outsiders speculate about the app’s potential demise, US-based TikTok employees say discussions of the ban happen more with their international counterparts or with non-ByteDance friends. “There’s almost a consensus not to talk about this thing. Very occasionally, some of us might say that maybe it’s time to jump ship, but those discussions rarely come up,” the TikTok product manager says.

    In April, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) was signed into law, requiring that TikTok sell its US operation to a domestic buyer or be banned. But months later, the topic mostly slipped out of news headlines even as politicians kept talking about China leading to the elections.

    So far, Kamala Harris has not made any comment about what she would do to TikTok as US president, but experts expect her to more or less carry out the Biden administration’s tech policy, including following through on the PAFACA Act.

    Donald Trump, on the other hand, publicly backtracked his 2020 stance on banning the app after reportedly being lobbied by Jeff Yass, a billionaire ByteDance investor. Most recently, Trump said in a September campaign video that “for all of those who want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump.” Yet he didn’t make saving TikTok a core talking point on his campaign stops, and people aren’t sure if he would uphold his latest opinion should he be elected.

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  • Election Season in America: Scenes From Around the Country

    Election Season in America: Scenes From Around the Country

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    Every presidential election feels like the most important yet. This one, though, may actually rise to the label. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump offer visions of the future for the US that couldn’t be more different. Their campaigns have diverged widely in tone, style, and substance. Maybe the only thing they have in common, in fact, is the extent to which they’ve been documented online.

    But while the memes and shares have in many ways defined the 2024 US presidential election, there’s a whole world of moments that have occurred outside of the viral limelight. At WIRED, we took a step back to look at the last months in moments, exploring places, scenes, and people that don’t always make the feeds. Below, we’re offering a different picture of an America that’s often at odds, and seldom offline.

    Image may contain Donald Trump People Person Electrical Device Microphone Head Clothing Hat Face Adult and Crowd

    Supporters of former US president Donald Trump are seen through a photo cutout as they arrive for a campaign rally at Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan, on November 1, 2024.Photograph: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/Getty Images

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  • An Oath Keeper Talks Civil War Over Pastrami and Rye

    An Oath Keeper Talks Civil War Over Pastrami and Rye

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    Chino Valley, AZ — Jim Arroyo arrived for our meeting at Lucy’s Bar and Grill—home of the “best badass burger in town”—wearing an Oath Keepers hoodie, a baseball hat, and a bracelet. He’s a short, stocky man with a white beard, who walks with a stick. He had a pistol strapped to his waist and was accompanied by his wife Janet.

    The two run the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, a corporate spin-off of the Oath Keepers militia that they formed in the aftermath of January 6, 2021.

    Arroyo tells me he’s been prepping the members of his organization for civil war following the election. (He claims membership exceeds 1,000; WIRED was unable to independently confirm this. The Rumble channel for his group has nearly 350 subscribers.)

    “The election can certainly trigger a civil war, no different than it happened in any number of countries around the world,” Arroyo says over pastrami on rye, fries, a side of horsey sauce, and coffee. “I’m training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, have enough supplies.”

    The couple is convinced that there is a grand conspiracy to prevent Trump from becoming president again. “They want to take him out so that he can’t get back in the White House,” says Jim Arroyo. WIRED spoke to the Arroyos on the eve of the election to get insight into how he views the potential for violence in the days to come, how he will react, and who he thinks will fire the first shots.

    Paramilitary groups have long leveraged fantasies about impending natural disasters or domestic conflicts to galvanize their members. Arroyo and his wife say they train members for all sorts of events, such as economic collapse, attacks on the electrical grid, civil unrest and World War 3. But the focus on civil war by paramilitary and anti-government groups has been particularly intense this year leading up to the election. A recent intelligence memo reported by WIRED warned that civil war rhetoric online was radicalizing individuals towards violence.

    In the aftermath of January 6, for which dozens of Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes were arrested, the paramilitary movement scrambled to distance itself from the stigma of the event—even the word “militia.” The Oath Keepers, once the most prominent militia organization in the U.S., essentially collapsed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of chapters dropped from 70 in 2020 to just 5 in 2020.

    Arroyo, like many others in the paramilitary movement seeking to distance themselves from the stigma of January 6, offered a sanitized view of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team. “We’re an educational organization,” he claims.

    Arroyo broke ties with the main Oath Keepers organization, and formed “The Oath Keepers of Yavapai County,” an independent group under the umbrella of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, a corporate nonprofit Arroyo founded over a decade ago. “It’s all the same basic program,” Arroyo said. It also includes the Lions of Liberty, the group’s political arm, which planned ballot drop box stakeouts during the 2022 midterms but agreed to stand down their operations before election day following a legal challenge.

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  • JD Vance’s Senate Office Fires Key Adviser Who Posted About Drug Use on Reddit

    JD Vance’s Senate Office Fires Key Adviser Who Posted About Drug Use on Reddit

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    Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s office has fired key financial policy adviser Aaron Kofsky. A recent WIRED investigation found that Kofsky had posted extensively on Reddit over a period of years about using a variety of drugs, including cocaine and opiates, and called Vance a “Trump boot licker.”

    WIRED had been preparing a story about the news and had asked Kofsky to comment by Monday morning. Shortly before the deadline he’d been given, he forwarded Politico’s Morning Money newsletter, which reported that he’d left Vance’s office. It was “an honor to serve Senator Vance and the people of Ohio over the past two years,” he told Politico, and he was “thankful that dark period in my life is far behind me.”

    Kofsky continued, “Listen, I definitely screwed up, but we’ve reached an unprecedented level of absurdity when this much work goes into smearing an America First staffer.” He went on to question WIRED’s motives for publishing the piece, saying “something else is going on here.”

    According to Kofsky, he was suspended on October 16, the same day WIRED published its report, and was subsequently fired. “I’m sure it was ultimately because those silly Reddit posts were exposed,” he tells WIRED. “I’d note that those posts were written in good humor and didn’t hurt anybody.”

    Vance’s office declined to comment.

    Under the username PsychoticMammal, Kofsky posted about using cocaine, opiates, kratom, and many others for more than a decade. He wrote about experiencing withdrawal symptoms from trying to kick tianeptine, or “gas station heroin,” and kratom. He advised other users on how to transport drugs through TSA checkpoints without getting caught. In one post, Kofsky listed all of the drugs he had tried up until that point and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10.

    As recently as January, Kofsky posted a video from a Senate committee hearing of Vance questioning a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent on nitazenes, or manufactured opioids. Kofsky posted the video to several drug-related subreddits, including r/Opioid_RCs, r/Drugs, r/Opiates, and r/ObscureDrugs.

    “Surprising! Politician knows about nitazenes. Ohio Senator JD Vance Asks Witness About Nitzenes. Is it just me, or is this super surprisng? Like I’m just confused how this guy had heard of zenes? I can’t imagine any of his colleagues know anything about them,” Kofsky posted about the video in r/ResearchChemicals.

    Kofsky appears in the background of the video.

    “Like millions of Americans, I’ve struggled with drug use, which in my case was mostly an attempt to self medicate against the effects of epilepsy and epilepsy medication,” Kofsky said in a statement to WIRED last month. “I deeply regret posting these comments. I’m not proud of this and I’m embarrassed it’s being publicized in this way, but I am thankful to say that part of my life is behind me.”

    Kofsky played a significant role in shaping Vance’s banking and financial services policy. He wrote “much of the language” for Vance’s proposal to regulate cryptocurrency and consulted with a number of crypto firms on its policies, according to Politico.

    “I was an asset to Vance’s office,” he says, “and will be an asset to whatever organization I end up with next.”

    Shortly before publication of this story, Kofsky took to X to share his version of events.

    You can follow all of WIRED’s 2024 presidential election coverage here.

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