Elections offices slowly turn to .gov domain in the fight against misinformation

While some of the highest profile misinformation this election season centered on bomb threats from Russian email addresses being sent to polling places, local elections offices had smaller issues to deal with during the recent election.

Coconino County, Arizona, for example, had to move quickly to dispel a rumor spread by an unknown group that anyone in the state could vote there using a federal-only ballot, even if they are registered in another county. The county debunked the rumor in a now-deleted “Misinformation Alert” on its official website.

One aspect that helped quickly tamp down those rumors was that the county operates its website on the .gov domain, so voters knew its message was coming from an authoritative voice. More than 1,200 states, and affiliated departments and agencies, and more than 4,700 cities and their municipal agencies use the domain, according to federal data.

But elections offices are still lagging in adopting the domain, according to data analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, which earlier this year found that 31% of election websites use .gov. That’s an increase from a 2022 report by the Center for Democracy and Technology, which found that only one quarter of websites use the domain.

Federal authorities have previously urged states and localities to adopt .gov for the cybersecurity benefits, and in 2021 waived the $400 fee to transition to the domain that is exclusively used by government agencies. For elections officials, being on .gov primarily helps establish them as a trusted source of information.

“Elections officials are the experts who are responsible for making sure that your vote is counted,” said Tim Harper, CDT’s senior policy analyst for elections and democracy. “That should be the case, but to make sure people trust their online presence, it's important that election officials have an authoritative website they can point to, and one of the best ways of doing that is to have a .gov domain. When users see that a .gov domain is used, it is a trust indicator that that is the official government website.”

Transitioning is not easy, however, and presents challenges for elections offices in large and small jurisdictions alike. Small localities might lack the IT support and staff necessary to make the transition, while larger cities and counties may face different headaches, like the need to rebrand all their public-facing material. Will Adler, associate director of BPC’s Elections Project, said there can be “huge variance” in adoption.

“As with everything in election administration, it varies a lot from county to county and state to state,” he said. “I've talked to some election officials who said it was a piece of cake, they worked with some IT contractor to do this, they managed to do it in a couple weeks. It was no big deal. But you'll talk to other counties who say, ‘Well, I don't have the staff to do it, or I literally can't do it even if I wanted to because the county executive has to do it. We're a sub domain of our county.’”

That is just one more factor making elections officials’ lives trickier as the offices evolve to take on more roles, even as their budgets do not grow. Being stretched so thin has resulted in troubling levels of turnover in elections offices nationwide, as leaders are forced to be experts in cybersecurity, communications, IT and other areas, in addition to their core responsibilities of administering elections. Switching domains could add to that chaos.

“This is just one more place that divides their attention and forces them to cover more bases,” Harper said.

State-level groups have continued to advocate for elections offices to shift to the .gov domain too. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers said the domain’s continued adoption is “essential” in its 2024 federal advocacy priorities. At NASCIO’s annual summit last month, its executive director Doug Robinson said it is “disconcerting” that less than 30% of elections offices use the domain.

“From an election security standpoint and misinformation, we want all of those local boards of elections to be on .gov, and many of them are not,” he said.

Beyond transitioning to the .gov domain, elections offices should work to ensure their social media accounts have the checkmarks to show they are verified to prevent fraud and protect their reputation. More broadly, Adler said it is important for offices to be “flooding the zone with accurate information” to combat misinformation. That will require robust communications and rapid response plans, he said, which may be tough given elections offices’ limited resources.

Regardless of the challenges that lie ahead in transitioning elections offices’ websites to .gov, Adler said those in charge understand it’s an important step in the fight against misinformation.

“It's fairly uncontroversial,” he said. “I haven't talked to any election officials who said that this was not a good idea.”