Democracy in the digital crosshairs: The race against AI-driven misinformation before the 2024 election

“You used to be able to say, ‘Don’t trust it unless you see it or hear it with your own ears and eyes.’ We can’t even trust that now,” Utah County Commissioner Amelia Power Gardner said Monday morning at Utah Valley University’s expert panel discussion regarding artificial intelligence’s impact on elections.
With the 2024 presidential election less than a week away, panelists from across the state discussed the growing mistrust among Americans and how AI-generated deepfakes are accelerating the spread of misinformation on social media.
According to Pew Research Center, in the late 1950s, about 73% of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing. That number has steadily declined, with only 24% in 2024 having trust in the government. The numbers vary based on political affiliation.
U.S. officials recently revealed they had identified fake AI-generation content circulated ahead of the 2020 presidential election as having origins from the Chinese and Iranian governments, per CNN. Artificial intelligence has only become more accessible and user-friendly in the last four years, causing the FBI to warn the public of foreign influence, potentially spreading misinformation with the motive to grow mistrust in voters.
“The goal of the people creating deepfakes is not just about the way you vote. It’s to make our democracy not work. That is their goal. In some ways, they could care less who you vote for as long as you believe that our system doesn’t work, because for our adversaries, that’s winning,” Michael Kaiser, president of Defending Digital Campaigns, said Monday at UVU.
“And countries have self-interest, right?” Kaiser added. “China’s very interested in what a future candidate is going to be (and) what their policy for China is going to be if they get elected.”
On the day of the 2020 presidential election, Gardner, who was county clerk for Utah County at the time, said a person called into the Glenn Beck program and accused one of Gardner’s ballot boxes of being fake.
She assured the panel audience that it was not and emphasized the harm in what the caller did:
If “your plan was to drop off your ballot on the way to work, and then you were listening to the radio on that drive, and you heard on the radio that this ballot drop box that you were going to use was a fake drop box” you likely wouldn’t take your vote to it “because you had been given misinformation that there was a fake ballot drop box” resulting in you potentially not casting your vote at all.
An uncast vote influences an election’s outcome just as greatly as a vote that is cast.
People are making deepfakes of presidential candidates Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, but another — and perhaps more persuasive tactic Gardner would argue — is “they’ll make a deepfake of a fake local support reporter reporting (the) news because oftentimes people don’t know who the names of every reporter in their local news stations are or their local newspapers,” she said.
“So they’ll create a deepfake and pretend to be a credible person reporting fake news.”
“I think the biggest threat to our Constitutional republic is people not having confidence in the results of our elections. And so if something makes you question the election, if something undermines your confidence in the election, or if it makes you apathetic and say, ‘Why does it matter if I vote,’ those are the things that are the most dangerous to the American experiment,” Gardner added.