Top Democrat urges Biden admin to do more to help local election officials fight a flood of disinformation

A top Democratic senator is asking the Biden administration to do more to help state and local governments detect and respond to online disinformation campaigns designed to manipulate voters in the November election, according to a letter obtained by NBC News.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the federal government’s civilian cybersecurity agency to ramp up support to state and local election officials who he said are facing an onslaught of false information — from domestic and foreign actors — that threatens to disrupt this fall’s voting.

“Unfortunately, throughout this election cycle we have witnessed an unprecedented rise in targeted election disinformation campaigns,” Warner wrote to Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“I strongly urge you to use all the tools at your disposal to provide state and local administrators with the necessary resources to uncover, build resilience against, and rapidly respond to information manipulation campaigns leading up to the election and afterwards,” Warner wrote.

Warner’s appeal comes after repeated warnings from intelligence officials that Russia, Iran and China are waging secret information operations to try to shape the election outcome and revelations that Iranian operatives hacked into former President Donald Trump’s campaign and tried to distribute stolen information to major media outlets.The senator’s letter coincides with growing concern among nonprofit groups and lawmakers that the federal government and social media tech firms are taking an overly passive approach to the threat of disinformation. They say some understaffed state and local election agencies are ill-equipped to