Chinese influence campaign amplifies doubt about U.S. election integrity ahead of Tuesday

Disinformation bots on X have started sharing reports and narratives hinting at widespread election fraud.

(This article is based on my story first published on VOAChinese.com)

The Chinese disinformation operation known as Spamouflage has started amplifying posts on social media that cast doubt on the integrity of this year’s U.S. presidential election, hinting at widespread voting fraud, a claim that has been promoted by some online right wing influencers and former president Donald Trump himself.

(Spamouflage accounts are bots pretending to be authentic users that promote narratives that align with Beijing’s talking points issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s human rights record, the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied spreading disinformation in the U.S..)

An ongoing investigation between Voice of America Mandarin and DoubleThink Lab, a Taiwan-based social media analytic firm, has been tracking hundreds of Spamouflage accounts on X since mid-August. Last week, we noticed an increase in the number of their posts questioning election integrity.

One Spamouflage account posted a video showing a group of people walking toward a voting station. Behind them was a long line of voters waiting to enter the same building. In another video, a man, talking to the camera, claimed that those were “foreigners” who jumped the line to vote.

“BUSSES of non-english speaking ‘citizens’ are guided past Americans who had been waiting in line for hours to cast their early votes,” the Spamouflage account wrote. “These people, all wearing Harris Walz stickers, were directed through the voting process by a handful of ‘translators’.”

The videos, along with the caption, were first posted by an X account called “Emma Cawood” and went viral on October 27. The Spamouflage account we tracked merely copied and pasted the original post without revealing its source.

The videos were recorded outside a voting station in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Responding to the videos and the accusation of non-citizen voting, the county released a statement, clarifying that what was seen in the first video was a “brief conversation between voters, their translators, and a County employee”.

“The County employee provided instructions that elderly and disabled people were allowed to sit while they waited for their applications to process (as County employees had allowed for any elderly or disabled voter who was attempting to vote at any of our Satellite Offices). The able-bodied voters returned to the back of the line, elderly and disabled voters were permitted to sit and wait their turn, and those who needed the assistance of a translator were able to use their translator to help them through the process,” the statement wrote.

Another Spamouflage account we tracked posted a news article of a Texas man’s encounter with an alleged voting machine error. According to the article from Dallas Express, a man said that he selected Republican presidential candidate Trump using the voting machine. But the physical ballot the machine printed out marked Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris. 

In a response to the reported incident, which was included in the Dallas Express article, Tarrant County elections administrator Clint Ludwig said in a statement that the voter’s incorrectly marked ballot was invalidated and replaced by a new and corrected ballot.

“Tarrant County Elections highly encourages voters to confirm their selections on the physical paper ballot before placing it into the scanner to be counted,” Ludwig said in the statement. “Tarrant County Elections has no reason to believe that votes are being switched by the voting system.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and an adamant supporter of Trump, has been one of the most vocal and influential promoters of election fraud claims. One of his posts on X questioning the integrity of the election was shared by a Spamouflage account.

“How insane is it that the Biden-Harris Administration is suing states to KEEP non-citizens on their voter rolls?” Musk’s post wrote, referring to the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Virginia’s removal of around 1,600 alleged non-citizen voters from the state government’s voter rolls.

The Justice Department and civil groups argued that the removal is too close to Election Day and that the purge has affected eligible voters. Several voters who are citizens told the media that they were victims of the removal.

After the removal was halted by a federal judge, the Supreme Court overruled the decision last week, allowing the purge to continue.

The VOA-DTL investigation found that, between October 23 and 31, a total of 38 Spamouflage accounts posted at least 55 times content that cast doubt on this year’s election integrity. 

Similar claims have been invoked by Trump himself. At a rally in Pennsylvania last week, the Republican candidate told his supporters that Democrats “have already started cheating”.

China is not the only country whose disinformation effort has been ramped up as the election day in the U.S. nears. The U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that Russia is responsible for at least three fabricated videos that claimed to have exposed election irregularities. 

The latest findings of the VOA-DTL investigation are in line with what we have discovered about the goal of China’s Spamouflage campaign, which is to discredit the U.S. government and its democratic system. 

By analyzing over 500 recent posts from four prominent Spamouflage accounts, we found that the vast majority of them targeted the U.S. while only a small portion of the posts were to defend or promote China.

Drug abuse, homelessness, racial inequality are among the top domestic issues exploited by Spamouflage. 

“The United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars to fund foreign wars while its cities look like this,” a Spamouflage post wrote with a video showing a tent outside a desolated building with a pile of trash left on the pavement.

But overall, U.S. support for Israel and Ukraine has been the leading target for Spamouflage, making up 26.7% of the 536 posts we analyzed. 

Based on these posts from Spamouflage, China doesn’t have a preferred candidate in this year’s election, which corroborates with reports released by U.S. intelligence agencies. 

China “probably does not plan to influence the outcome, as it continues to see little reward in attempting to do so due to its perception that both political parties seek to contain China,” an unclassified assessment from the office of the Director of National Intelligence asserted in July. “However, we are tracking efforts to influence the U.S. public more broadly.”

Our analysis found that none of the three candidates, including Trump, Harris and former Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, was depicted in a generally positive way.

“Biden and Trump are both the worst president ever,” one Spamouflage post wrote.

On Harris, a Spamouflage account posted that “simply put her values are lying and lying again”.

DoubleThink Lab wrote in an analysis of the 536 posts that China’s Spamouflage campaign aims at eroding the public’s trust in the U.S. both on domestic and international issues.

“According to the Spamouflage accounts, the United States has plenty of domestic issues,” the assessment wrote. “Neither Trump, Biden, or Harris can solve these issues because they are unfit for office and only seek to please Israel.”