Early voting is kicked off this weekend at five locations across the county; according to multiple reports, voters kept the polling places busy. Meanwhile, election officials are working to combat misinformation, including a sign that appeared in southern Ulster County falsely claiming that New York voters must present identification in order to vote.

The incident of in-real-life disinformation happened around Oct. 19 when someone placed a sign on a public median reading “No ID No Vote Don’t Show Up.” A complaint about the sign reached the Office of the New York State Attorney General, which in turn notified the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office which dispatched deputies to remove the sign. New York is one of 14 states that do not require voters to present ID at the polls. Instead, signatures stored in electronic poll books are used to verify voters’ identity.

At the Ulster County Board of elections, Republican Commissioner John Quigley and his Democratic counterpart Ashley Torres moved quickly to combat the disinformation with a mass email and statement posted to the board’s website. Quigley said that his team had anticipated confusion, or deliberate attempts to mislead voters about voter ID requirements.

“We knew somewhere in the timeline between now and election day that we were going to have to put out a similar reminder,” said Quigley. “It’s a conversation being had because people are sometimes mistakenly taking what’s being said in other states and applying it to New York.”

Torres, who like Quigley has served as election commissioner since 2020 (in New York State each county election’s board is headed by a commissioner from each major party who make decisions jointly), said combatting misinformation and disinformation is now a routine part of the job as conspiracy theories and deliberate efforts to mislead voters metastasize online.

“It’s a real issue, something we have to deal with routinely,” said Dittus.

Distrust of elections has become a phenomenon since 2020 when former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the election was stolen. A poll conducted in January by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Group showed that 32 percent of Americans and 63 percent of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. That perception thrives despite extensive evidence that voting fraud is exceedingly rare.

Efforts to combat mistrust in elections were rooted in transparency, Torres said. Unlike other county departments, the Board of Elections has independent control of its website, allowing staff to quickly respond to misinformation and post data and explanations of the board’s operations on a near-daily basis.

“We post as much information as we can, more than we are required to,” said Torres. “So that voters and the public know what rules and parameters we follow at every step of the process.”

That hasn’t stopped one group, New York Citizen’s Audit, from bombarding election boards statewide, including Ulster County’s, with Freedom of Information Law requests demanding reams of data — some of it public information and some not. Torres said the group’s tactics included sending documents that appeared to be lawsuits but were not and lobbying local elected officials with the message that the voter rolls were full of bad data and not to be trusted. Torres said the group used fluctuations in voter data as evidence of malfeasance ignoring the fact that the rolls change constantly based on information received by the boar.

“They are working off this assumption that the documents are set in stone when in fact they are living documents where we’re sharing information on a daily basis on people who have moved, people who have died, people who have been convicted of a felony and are now not eligible to vote because they’re on incarceration status [In New York, convicted felons can vote as long as they are not currently incarcerated],” said Torres. “They have a narrative that they want to believe and they’re looking for data to support it.”