The Washington Secretary of State’s Office is making a new effort to track and address misinformation about voting and elections. It recently hired the British company Logically to scan social media sites for misleading narratives that could threaten election integrity, as well as physical threats to staff, and generate biweekly reports on its findings. The move led to backlash from the state Republican Party, which called the effort “unethical” and “tyranny.” A similar contract between the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office and Logically also received backlash from the Oregon GOP and Republican state lawmakers.
Jim Brunner is following these issues as a political reporter at The Seattle Times. He joins us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Washington Secretary of State’s office has a new effort to track and address misinformation about voting and elections. It recently hired the British company Logically to scan social media sites for misleading narratives that could threaten election integrity or lead to violence against election staff. The move led to a backlash from the state’s Republican party which calls the effort “unethical” and “a tyranny.” A similar contract in Oregon with the same company has also received Republican pushback. Jim Brunner has been writing about this issue as a political reporter at the Seattle Times. He joins us with more details. Welcome back to the show.
Jim Brunner: Thank you.
Miller: It’s probably obvious to our listeners here, but what’s the context here, before we get to the details? Why did the Attorneys General in Washington and in Oregon sign these contracts in the first place?
Brunner: Oh, they were Secretaries of State in Washington and Oregon.
Miller: I’m sorry about that.
Brunner: Yeah. Well, the context is, as everybody probably knows - but yeah, we can rehash it and it’s going to become hot again - is a flood of misinformation about elections largely driven by Donald Trump’s narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And there’s been a cascading effect down the ballot, even in state races in many states including in Washington State. For example, our last gubernatorial Republican candidate lost to Governor Jay Inslee by more than 500,000 votes, but then claimed that it was fraudulent and tried to file a lawsuit, which he immediately pulled back. He didn’t really have anything to it.
So as elections officials look at 2024, they’re thinking, this is not going away, this is gonna possibly even get worse. And so they are looking at an effort to say, we’re going to scan social media and see what kind of narratives are developing out there so that we can respond to them.
Miller: What did Jim Walsh, the chair of the State Republican Party, allege in their complaint?
Brunner: Jim Walsh - who is also a state legislator, by the way, in Washington - he filed a complaint for the State Republican Party with the state’s Executive Ethics Board, and he basically said that Steve Hobbs, our Secretary of State, had violated the Constitution and his oath of office by hiring this British tech firm to do this work. He was saying that basically this is a bridge too far, that the government shouldn’t be in the business of scanning social media. And he and other republicans have kind of referred to it as snooping and spying. He would reject the notion that this is an effort to tackle misinformation. He would say that it’s an effort to suppress conservatives.
Miller: How did that Executive Ethics Board respond?
Brunner: The staff looked at it and said this is not really in our purview. Our state Executive Ethics Board is kind of limited in what it looks at, and so this kind of complaint with the broad claims of constitutionality and things like this sort of wasn’t really the right venue. The complaint also had some false statements in it like saying the state legislature had rejected this kind of effort by the Secretary of State, when in fact they actually put money in the budget for this kind of effort. So the Ethics Board, their attorney wrote back to the State Republican Party and said, we’re not even going to open an investigation here because you haven’t provided us enough evidence of the types of ethics violations that we investigate.
Miller: What about Steve Hobbs? What did he say when you talked to him about these accusations that this effort is snooping or spying or at base is about cracking down, not on misinformation, but on political opponents?
Brunner: Steve Hobbs, who is a Democrat and a relatively new Secretary of State in Washington, he says, look, this is something that I’ve said I was gonna do when I first was appointed to the office and then ran for election and was elected. So it’s not like a surprise. He defends the contract and says we’ve actually had instances of elections officials in Washington being threatened with violence and we need to know about this. And the easiest way to do that is to hire this company that has an expertise and it markets itself to elections officials and some staff with the Secretary of State’s office had actually, I think, seen a presentation or a booth or something by this company at a national conference. And he said he was struck back kind of snarkily in a way at the Republican complaint. He said, unlike Jim Walsh, I actually put on a uniform and defended democracy. He’s been in the Army and National Guard.
He also made a crack about, instead of putting out misinformation about this contract and relying on a person who makes pillows as your expert, maybe you should contact me. And that’s a reference to the My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who, as you may know, spread a lot of election conspiracy theories and some Washington lawmakers, Republicans, have kind of bought on to some of those and gone to his conferences. And the State Republican Party’s election integrity chair also has actually presented at some of those conferences.
Miller: What exactly is this British company, Logically? I have to say an adverb as a name for a company makes it hard to say. But regardless, what are they going to be doing?
Brunner: Well, branding experts probably came up with this and were paid a lot of money. But they say that they use artificial intelligence as well as experts to… they specialize and they advertise as, we’re a company that has an expertise in looking at misinformation and responding to it and we can help you with that. And so the Secretary of State gave them a no bid contract, which I still have some questions about, frankly, for about $273,000. And in exchange for that, this company sends regular reports to the Secretary of State’s office about what they call narratives and/or threats to elections officials or kind of stories about the election process.
Miller: The basic idea seems to be that without some kind of AI juiced tech search capability, that state workers wouldn’t have the time or the resources to scour all of social media. So, what kinds of posts or comments do they flag? I mean, what kinds of things end up in the weekly wrap up?
Brunner: Yeah, this is interesting because I do think that when I looked at the things that have been flagged - and I haven’t seen every report that the company has sent - but they kind of run the gamut from, they’re all about elections and people commenting on news stories, for example, about voting. Or there was a little controversy here in King County about the King County elections department had to change the server out because it wasn’t functioning or something before the primary election that we just had. And they didn’t notify the County Republican Party and the County Republican Party was irritated by that. And they complained and actually King County elections said, ok, we should have communicated better but it didn’t affect an election or anything.
So people are commenting on social media about this story and of course, some people are very suspicious of it. Some people are making totally unsubstantiated claims saying, oh, they’re putting in the software to make sure that the Democrat gets elected. And other people are just saying, hey, they should do a better job here, so it runs the gamut. And so some of the posts that are flagged, I would say, are not false or misinformation. They’re just people talking about it. And the Logically report to the Secretary of State says, here’s how many people saw this, here’s what it says. And then they kind of give a little narrative about, this kind of talk could lead to distrust in elections, and they sort of just flagged that for the Secretary of State.
Miller: But I guess the real question is then, what does the state government - in this case the Secretary of State - do with it? I mean, do they call Meta [and] say, hey, take down the comment number 4,652 by this user? What do they do?
Brunner: No, they say that they are not doing that. We have seen examples in the past where various government agencies have tried to flag stuff on Twitter, for example. They say they’re not doing this, that they are just watching to see what is being talked about, with the idea that if it gets broad enough, if they see a really damaging false narrative out there, conspiracy theory or something about elections or a threat against election workers, they can respond either publicly by putting out statements to the media or contacting county elections departments. Or, if it’s an actual violent threat, they would presumably contact law enforcement, but they say they are not contacting Meta or X at this point to take anything down.
Miller: You mentioned that you still have questions about this $273,000 no bid contract. How did this come to be? And then we’ll get to your questions.
Brunner: Clearly, the Secretary of State’s office had been familiar with this company’s work and wanted to hire it for this work. And in Washington, you can do some no bid contracts - they call them sole source contracts. But generally speaking, you have to provide some kind of justification to a separate state agency.
Miller: And I mean, just so people understand no bid, meaning normally a government would say we want these services, tell us how much you would charge for them. They could look at those various bids and then decide if somebody can actually provide the services at the cheapest cost, that should be the one they would go for. This is not that. This is just…
Brunner: This is just, we want to hire these people, so here we go. And so the way they went about it is not that process that I just described. The Secretary of State’s office doesn’t really have their own very large contracting departments. The contract, if you look at it and I posted it online, they did the contract through a community college, which has a larger staff supposedly for contracting. And so the contract actually taxed on an extra 15% to pay South Puget Sound Community College to kind of do the administration. And South Puget Sound Community College said, well, we created this as a client service contract, they call it, and that is exempt when we do it from these normal competitive, no bid justification contracts. In other words, they said we were allowed to do this and we didn’t have to even post a justification on the website. But I put in a records request to try to get more information about that. The Secretary of State’s office has pointed out that they have other contracts that they’ve run through that office and so it’s not a one off that they did just for this one, but it certainly is unusual.
Miller: Going back to the big picture before we say goodbye, unless something surprising happens at the national level, we’re looking at a rematch of the 2020 election. What have you been hearing from either county elections officials or the folks in the Secretary of State’s office about what they’re expecting or what they’re fearing in 2024?
Brunner: Well, I think a lot of people are very concerned and even in the midterms, they had to deal with a lot of misinformation and people claiming that things weren’t going right with that election in Washington. There’s a lot of concern and just the idea that they need to prepare for what could happen in 2024. We all saw what happened in 2020. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Trump lost, that he would again make claims that he didn’t lose, for example. And that generates a lot of activity and some threats towards election officials. So they’re definitely concerned.
I think, as in most states, the elections are actually run by various counties. They all have their own elected auditor, somebody who runs it and they’re taking various approaches. In some conservative counties, they actually have decided that they are going to remove some safeguards that are on most election computers to try to stop hackers, for example, because they’re suspicious, they think that maybe these devices are actually a way to manipulate elections. So it really varies from county to county, but there’s a lot of concern about what could happen.
Miller: Jim Brunner, thanks very much.
Brunner: Thank you.
Miller: Jim Brunner is a political reporter at The Seattle Times.
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