Ballotpedia:The Andrew Walz hoax candidacy
By Leslie Graves, President
March 20, 2020
On February 27, 2020, Ballotpedia was notified that an article we published about Andrew Walz was based on a hoax candidacy.
This article talks about our response. It goes over the policies we put in place to prevent a similar situation happening in the future.
What happened?
On December 21, 2019, an individual submitted materials through Ballotpedia’s Candidate Connection portal indicating that his name was Andrew Walz and that he was a candidate for Rhode Island's 1st Congressional District. He submitted a candidate survey, a campaign website, and campaign social media profiles he had made on Facebook and Twitter.
Consistent with its policies at that time:
- Ballotpedia published a short profile about Andrew Walz.
- Ballotpedia added information about the Andrew Walz candidacy to its database of candidates. The database is made available to data clients through Ballotpedia’s API.
On or about February 27, 2020, a 17-year-old contacted Donie O'Sullivan, a reporter for CNN. The minor told the reporter that he had submitted a hoax candidacy to Ballotpedia and that Ballotpedia had accepted this hoax candidacy as legitimate. The minor also pointed out to CNN that due to the fact that Twitter relies on Ballotpedia to provide information about candidates in order to inform its decisions about placing U.S. Election Badges on Twitter pages that Twitter had, because of its reliance on Ballotpedia, also been taken in by the hoax.[1]
On February 28, CNN published an article about the incident, "A high school student created a fake 2020 candidate. Twitter verified it".[2] In the next few days, the incident was covered by several other media outlets.[3][4][5][6]
What policy change did Ballotpedia enact?
On February 28, Ballotpedia changed its policies regarding how it defines an official candidate.
According to the new policy, in order to define a candidacy as official, Ballotpedia must have evidence that the candidate has registered his or her candidacy with the Federal Election Commission or, if the candidate is running for a state-level office or state legislative seat, with the relevant state election agency.
In some cases, Ballotpedia staff will be able to locate evidence that the candidate has filed with the relevant federal or state campaign finance agency. In other cases, Ballotpedia will request substantiating information from the candidate. This article—FAQs regarding proof of official candidacy—explains the procedures.
Prior to obtaining this evidence, Ballotpedia will add the person to our database as an unofficial declared candidate. Once Ballotpedia has received or located evidence from the Federal Election Commission or relevant state campaign finance agency that a given candidate has registered his or her candidacy, Ballotpedia will then proceed to mark the person as an official candidate in our database and build a profile about the candidate.
Will the new policy prevent hoax candidacies?
Under the new policy, if an individual were to carry a hoax candidacy to the extent of registering his or her candidacy with the Federal Election Commission or state-level campaign finance agency, Ballotpedia under its February 2020 policy would regard and define this candidacy as official. Ballotpedia would publish an article about that candidate and enter that candidacy into its database.
Note that a false registration with a federal or state agency may carry civil or criminal penalties.
However, Ballotpedia (under its February 2020 policy and its previous policy), only takes declared or campaign-finance-registered candidacies as official until the time of a state’s official candidacy filing deadline. At that point, the state government elections agency, for both federal and state candidates, is the official source on which candidacies have earned a spot on that state’s ballot and hence, are real.
Note that most of the time, candidates file as a candidate with an official campaign finance agency well before (often many months before) their state’s official filing deadline. The state agency that determines which candidates are ballot-certified is distinct in most states from the agency that regulates campaign finance. One type of agency determines whether a candidate has met with official qualifications for ballot certification; these differ in very significant ways from state-to-state. The other type of agency regulates campaign finance activities. Campaign finance activities are typically generated very early on in the life cycle of a candidacy while meeting the official ballot certification qualifications often comes much later.
Once the date has passed in a given state by which any and all candidates must have fulfilled all requirements for earning an official spot on the state’s ballot, that becomes Ballotpedia’s sole determinant of an official candidacy. (In the case of Andrew Walz, who according to the hoax candidacy was running for a U.S. House office in Rhode Island, Ballotpedia would have purged him as a candidate on June 24—since that is Rhode Island's 2020 filing deadline—along with every other candidate who had failed to meet Rhode Island’s ballot-certification requirements.)
What was the old policy?
Many candidates for public office declare their candidacies and begin campaigning prior to the time that they are legally required to register their campaigns with a federal or state campaign finance regulation agency. Typically, this happens:
- Because the candidate hasn't yet met the dollar threshold for campaign financial activity after which they are legally required to register. For a federal candidate, that threshold is $5,000, and after the candidate has raised or spent that much money, they are then legally required to register their candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. Each of the 50 state agencies that regulate campaign finance activity for state-level candidacies sets its own threshold.
- Because the candidate is planning to run a very grassroots-oriented campaign which possibly never meets the campaign-finance threshold.
Registering with a campaign finance agency, if the candidate hasn't yet met the threshold, or may expect to never meet the threshold, imposes an additional burden on the candidate.
Because of this, prior to adopting the February 2020 policy, Ballotpedia had a category of “declared candidate”. Once an individual met our threshold for having declared a candidacy, Ballotpedia would publish a short article about the candidacy and add the candidate to our database.
In the wake of the Andrew Walz hoax, this policy was no longer tenable and that is why we now require candidates, even those who haven't met their legal threshold for registering with a campaign finance agency, to go ahead and do so if they want us to regard their candidacy as official.
"Adversarial thinking"
In the wake of these events, we thought long and hard about how we had allowed this to happen. One reporter, when speaking to us about it, said several times, "But how could you have let this happen?" In retrospect, it seemed to all of us to have been a loophole (or problem waiting to happen) big enough to drive a truck through.
Renee DiResta is the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.[7] Observing this event, she tweeted that when an organization like Ballotpedia becomes a significant source of information for others, as Ballotpedia is through its API, this then "Requires entities that didn’t previously have to think adversarially to start envisioning all the ways they will be manipulated as well."[8]
That struck a chord with us. We realized that in addition to fixing our policies around how we define an official candidate, we also needed to reflect more broadly on any other vulnerabilities we might have to deliberate hoaxes and manipulations. This is an important way for us to think through our systems, not just now, as we have done, but on a continuing basis.
We also took note of this story: On March 5, 2020, the Houston Chronicle covered a story where incumbent Harold Dutton Jr. alleged that a fake candidate had actually appeared on the official government-issued March 3 primary election ballot in his race. [9] He alleged that a "Natasha Ruiz", who received about 20% of the vote on the March 3 primary, and in so doing, forced him into a runoff election, was not a real person. The Harris County Democratic Party issued a statement, saying, "The facts we have are that on December 9th, during the 30 day filing period to be placed on the Democratic Party primary ballot, a person claiming to be Natasha Ruiz came to the party office with the required elements to file: an application, identification, and filing fee. This application was subsequently approved, and the name of this candidate appeared on the March 3rd Democratic Party primary ballot."[10]
Timeline of Ballotpedia's response to the Andrew Walz hoax candidacy
As the Andrew Walz hoax candidacy events unfolded, Ballotpedia published an ongoing log for its readers and reporters about the actions it was taking. The log/archive is here: Ballotpedia: Legitimacy of Andrew Walz 2020 election candidacy and Ballotpedia profile.
Footnotes
- ↑ Twitter: "About election labels on Twitter"
- ↑ CNN, "A high school student created a fake 2020 candidate. Twitter verified it", February 28, 2020
- ↑ Time, "When a Teenager Reportedly Invented a Fake Congressional Candidate, Twitter Verified the Made Up Politician's Account", February 29, 2020
- ↑ CNET, "Twitter was tricked into verifying a fake 2020 candidate, report says", February 28, 2020
- ↑ Washington Post, "News literacy lessons: Student finds a flaw in Twitter’s candidate verification — and teens turn to TikTok for politics", March 3, 2020
- ↑ New York Post, "Twitter verifies teen’s fake GOP congressional candidate", February 28, 2020
- ↑ About Renee DiResta
- ↑ Renee DiResta tweet, February 28, 2020
- ↑ Houston Chronicle, "Forced into runoff, Rep. Harold Dutton investigates opponent he says may not exist", March 5, 2020
- ↑ Reform Austin, "Who Exactly Is Natasha Ruiz?", March 9, 2020
