Make sure your driving record is clear, citizen. See that you've paid off your parking tickets and paid up your child support, and remembered to bring two forms of ID before showing up to the polls on Thursday. That's the preposterous, predictable refrain of the voter "information" flyers and robocalls that crop up like clockwork—usually in minority neighborhoods—during election season, touting ersatz endorsements, fictitious voting requirements, and precisely-wrong times, dates, and places at which to make your voice heard in the democratic process. With old-fashioned smear campaigns already proving disturbingly effective in digital form, civil rights activists worry that it's only a matter of time before voter suppression tactics make the leap to the Internet. Earlier this week, at the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, they braced for the inevitable.

As NAACP attorney Jenigh Garrett explained, traditional vote-suppression campaigns often targeted African-American communities. African-American voters have for decades supported Democrats by huge margins, making race a reasonable proxy for partisanship, while geographic clustering makes it possible to contain the misinformation. The best lies often contain some small kernel of truth, making them seem more plausible to their intended audience. So often, Garrett noted, voter suppression fliers capitalize on the combination of aggressive policing practices and high incarceration rates in urban black neighborhoods, as well as the fact that many states do disenfranchise felons, to attempt to persuade potential votes that any interaction with the law renders them ineligible.

Online misinformation campaigns, panelists suggested, would necessarily look different in some respects, but are likely to operate on many of the same fundamental principles as their real-space precursors. Tech strategist Jon Pincus, campaign software entrepreneur John Aristotle Phillips, and Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center discussed a variety of tactics we're likely to see deployed—perhaps as early as November. Young people—who have been turning out in large numbers for Barack Obama, and who disproportionately seek their information online—would be likely targets, most believed, though online affinity groups and social networks would also permit targeted messaging.



From left to right: Chuck Fish, Ari Schwartz, Susan Crawford, and Daniel Weitzner

Taking a cue from phishing con artists, political scammers might seek to hijack or spoof the official sites of campaigns or local election boards, giving their misinformation an added veneer of credibility. Similarly, spoofed e-mails could be employed to persuade recipients that information is coming from a trusted source. In addition to conventional denial of service attacks, the Internet might also be used to facilitate distributed phone-jamming, of the sort often used to disrupt get-out-the-vote efforts.

The Internet offers some distinct advantages for both voter suppression campaigns and their opponents. The timing of misinformation efforts is vital: The bad information needs to be disseminated relatively close to election day, with enough lead time to be spread to voters, but not enough for opponents to employ countermeasures. The speed of online communications allows scammers far greater precision on this front, but also allows for the rapid collation and correction of false information. Campaigns targeted by deceptive flyers often aren't even aware of their existence until it's too late. Similarly, the social networks that are apt to make such attractive targets for deceptive tactics also create fora for the exposure of those tactics. And while well-planned campaigns should be effectively untraceable, less competent scammers may leave electron trails that can be traced.

Also on hand at the panel was Rachana Bhowmik, legislative counsel for Barack Obama, who touted the senator's Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, which has passed the House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate. The bill would criminalize the knowing dissemination of false election information for the purpose of vote suppression, though in order to avoid encroaching on protected political speech (parody, for example), certain forms of misinformation, such as bogus endorsements, are not covered. While the law would not necessarily deter deceptive tactics, Bhowmik hopes it would at least convince journalists that such misinformation campaigns were newsworthy.

Until then, be sure to check Snopes before you head to the polls. You can take care of the parking tickets later.