TAZEWELL COUNTY, Ill. – After the FBI announced Wednesday night they had seen foreign disinformation being spread with an attempt to persuade U.S. voters, Tazewell County Clerk John Ackerman said Thursday at a news conference that citizens votes are safe.
Iran is responsible for emails meant to intimidate American voters and sow unrest in multiple states, and Tehran and Moscow have also obtained voter registration with the goal of interfering in the election, U.S. officials said at a rare news conference Wednesday night just two weeks before the vote.
John Ratcliffe, the intelligence director, and FBI Director Chris Wray said the U.S. will impose costs on any foreign countries interfering in the 2020 U.S. election.
Despite the Iranian and Russian actions, they said Americans can be confident that their vote will be counted.
“These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” Ractliffe said.
The news conference was held as Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have received threatening emails, falsely purporting to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for President Donald Trump.
The voter-intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and home addresses and can include email addresses and phone numbers.
Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the Nov. 3 election, for which early voting is ongoing.
Ackerman said his office has received numerous calls with concerns about what it means for the election.
“There is no way the votes you cast can be hacked, manipulated, changed, or anything like that,” said Ackerman. “What’s being discussed on the national media is disinformation.”
Disinformation being spread by these third-party groups, according to Ackerman, relates to polling locations and voter intimidation.
“It does not involve, and cannot involve in the state of Illinois, the manipulation of your actual votes that you cast,” said Ackerman. “In the state of Illinois, all votes that are cast have a paper ballot attached with them.”
Ackerman said those paper ballots are ran through the machines after the election to ensure the same result is reached.
“If, somehow, there was a way to change the results, that is where it would be caught,” said Ackerman. “None of the information that we have concerning actual votes being counted is broadcast over the internet or using any open circuit that could be hacked.”
There is no way that your results on Nov. 3 can be manipulated, hacked or changed.”
Ackerman added that no polling location in Tazewell County will be closed due to COVID-19.
