Staff at US voting machine firms prep for doxxing, misinformation and ‘swatting’

(Reuters) – Staff at U.S. voting machine companies have removed public information about themselves from the internet and have made contingency plans with local law enforcement ahead of the 2024 election, after suffering harassment in 2020, according to industry representatives.

Following the 2020 election, which Republican candidate Donald Trump falsely claimed he had won, some workers at election technology vendors reported that they had been “doxxed” – private information about their homes, such as pictures of their front doors, had been shared online, according to Sara Cutter, the executive director of the American Council for Election Technology.

Employees with companies that provide voting machine equipment and services are not taking any chances this time around, Cutter said.

She said they were conferring with police about how to prepare, including in case they are “swatted” – when a false crime is reported to induce a heavy, armed police response at someone’s home.

The “level of threat has increased exponentially and has not cooled off since 2020,” Cutter said. Her organization was started in 2022 and includes companies like Election Systems & Software and Smartmatic.

She declined to comment on any specific legal preparations being made by the companies, but said some had taken significant actions to plan for any physical threats.

Smartmatic, Dominion Voting Systems and others are also seeking to combat misinformation about themselves and their owners, debunking on their websites a variety of false claims that have been shared online, including assertions that billionaire investor George Soros has an ownership stake or that they have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Smartmatic, a voting technology provider, sent a letter to media organizations this week in which it asked for “vital cooperation in preventing the spread of misinformation regarding the technology and services we will be providing.”

Cutter said voting technology companies have also been offering tours of their facilities and reaching out to election administrators and media to help bring more awareness to how they operate.

In September, conservative outlet Newsmax Media reached a confidential settlement with Smartmatic over false claims it published that Smartmatic machines were rigged to help steal the 2020 election from Trump, while Fox settled a defamation lawsuit by Dominion for $787.5 million last year.

In recent days, prominent Trump supporters Elon Musk and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have revived the debunked allegations that results from Dominion voting machines cannot be trusted.

Dominion – whose equipment is in use in precincts with more than 52 million registered voters across 27 states – posted to Musk’s X social media platform that it was “closely monitoring claims around the Nov. 2024 election” and “remain fully prepared to defend our company & our customers against lies and those who spread them.”

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Dominion employees have faced direct physical threats and a Dominion executive obtained a temporary restraining order in one case in 2022, CNN reported in August.

A Dominion spokesperson declined to comment on the report or on recent steps taken by company staff.

Chris Wlaschin, the chief information security officer for Election Systems & Software, said in an interview that a former address associated with him was posted online after the 2020 election, and that threats and misinformation about him and his colleagues have “continued ever since.”

(Reporting by AJ Vicens in Detroit; editing by Chris Sanders and Rosalba O’Brien)