Debunking Voting Misinformation About the Midterm Elections

Voting-related falsehoods and rumors are flourishing across social media in the final stretch before Election Day on Tuesday.

Much of the misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are swirling on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, build on familiar and unsubstantiated narratives spread about the 2020 presidential election. They include debunked claims of meddling with voting equipment, falsehoods about fraudulent ballots, alleged malfeasance by elections officials and unsubstantiated rumors about mail-in voting.

Many of the posts are outright falsehoods, while others appear intended to simply raise doubts and undermine confidence in voting, researchers said. And they are spreading through more conduits, such as the fast-rising video app TikTok and right-wing social media sites like Truth Social, Rumble and Telegram, according to the data research firms Zignal and Graphika and researchers.

“People are primed, much more mobilized and more soaked in conspiracy theories,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist who studies election misinformation at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Here are some of the most widespread falsehoods and rumors related to voting.

Voting machines aren’t rigged.

President Donald J. Trump and his allies falsely claimed in 2020 that ballot-tabulating machines had changed votes for him to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. They claimed the voting machines were connected to the internet, allowing corrupt election officials and outsiders to tamper with the equipment.

While voting machines sometimes encounter programming errors, they are rare, and the equipment is tested before and after Election Day, election officials said. For example, in Maricopa County, Ariz., a political battleground and focal point of conspiracy theorists around the 2020 election, four independent auditors check the security of the equipment, which does not connect to the internet.

Even so, falsehoods about the machines have picked up online in recent weeks.

On Twitter, “voting machines” has been a top voting-related narrative related to the midterm elections, with more than 89,888 mentions in October, nearly double the 49,765 mentions during the same month in 2021 but down from 191,391 in October before the midterm elections in 2018, according to Zignal.

Last month, a Wisconsin state representative said voting machines in the state were connected to the internet. Equipment makers and security experts refuted the claim, but Mr. Trump seized on the falsehood and posted the Wisconsin official’s statement on his social media site, Truth Social.

“Rigged Election, what a mess,” he wrote. The post was shared more than 5,000 times and liked more than 13,000 times.

Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a Trump supporter, was featured last week in several interviews on the video-sharing site Rumble saying that voting machines were connected to the internet and had been tampered with to steal elections. One of his interviews on Rumble was viewed more than 20,000 times.

Ballot fraud isn’t rampant.

Over the past month, there were more than 365,592 mentions of “voter fraud” on Twitter, up 25 percent from October 2018, according to Zignal.

Claims of voter fraud have often centered on ballot drop boxes. One false theory involves Democrats paying people to stuff the boxes with illegal ballots. The idea was stoked by the May release of the film “2000 Mules,” which asserted with little evidence that illegal drop box stuffing could be traced through cellphone location data. Security experts and former Attorney General William P. Barr have refuted the claims.

Last month, Melody Jennings, a Trump supporter and the founder of CleanElectionsUSA, an activist group that has spread unfounded rumors of illegal drop-box stuffing, warned on Truth Social that “mules” — or people who were allegedly vote-trafficking — were “doing their thing” at drop boxes in Maricopa County. She and other conspiracy theorists falsely said these mules had stuffed boxes with illegal ballots and called for volunteers to watch over the boxes. Her post was shared more than 3,000 times and liked 7,400 times.

Conspiracy theories about the handling of ballots by election officials are also circulating on social media. According to one unsubstantiated theory, election officials are purposely confusing voters over the kinds of pens that can be used to mark ballots — and declaring that ballots marked with Sharpie pens aren’t counted.

Those false claims, which have circulated since 2020, resurfaced in July when a Maricopa County election office sent an advisory suggesting that voters use felt-tip pens on their ballots. The advisory created a backlash online, with several voters posting on Twitter and Facebook that they would instead use blue ballpoint pens because they worried that ballots marked with felt-tip pens provided at polling stations would not be counted.

Dead people and illegal immigrants aren’t being exploited.

False rumors of voting by dead people and illegal immigrants have long circulated, including after the 2020 election in states such as Arizona, Virginia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. In all of these states, a small fraction of ballots were cast in the names of dead individuals.

The trope has reared its head again online ahead of the midterms.

Politicians including Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, have recently said without evidence that Democrats want immigrants who are in the United States illegally to vote.

“Any illegal alien who attempts to vote in our elections should be arrested and deported,” Mr. Gaetz tweeted on Sunday. His post was shared more than 7,000 times and liked more than 48,000 times.

Last week, Texas Scorecard, a self-described citizen journalism group, posted a video on YouTube claiming without evidence that Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for governor in Texas, had sent pre-filled voter registration applications to dead people. Texas officials validate all voter registration applications. The video was viewed 5,000 times.

Voting by mail isn’t untrustworthy.

Some Republican candidates and voters are using social media to cast doubt on whether ballots sent by mail or submitted into drop boxes are counted. “Mail-in voting” and “mail-in ballots” have been mentioned over 338,528 times in the past month on Twitter, up from 137,507 in the October 2021 and 114,159 in October 2018, according to Zignal.

Conspiracy theorists also seized on a story last month of the burning of a mail truck that was allegedly carrying ballots in Georgia. Images of the burning truck were spread across social media as a sign of cheating in the election, even though an election official later said there were no ballots on the truck.

Social media users have used such incidents to warn against mail-in voting. The hashtag #GetOutAndVoteInPerson has spread widely on Telegram from communities with pro-Trump, Christian, military and election conspiracy theory leanings, said Kyle Weiss, a researcher at Graphika.

Voting by mail has taken place for more than 150 years, and fraud is extremely rare, according to the Brennan Center, a nonprofit voter rights organization. In rural areas and for low-income and disabled voters, voting by mail is often the only option. Rules for mail-in voting and the use of drop boxes vary by state

Delays in counting votes are not irregularities.

Official results for many races on Tuesday won’t be announced that night and may not be for days because the counting of votes could take longer. Some social media users are focusing on potential counting delays to raise suspicions of election irregularities, state officials and voting experts said.

Last Thursday, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, responded to a news report that Pennsylvania’s top elections official expected official vote counting to take days. “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes?” he tweeted. “The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.” The tweet was shared more than 5,500 times and liked 19,200 times.

Tallying a final count typically takes days in some states because of the many mail-in votes. In Pennsylvania, officials can begin counting mail-in ballots only on Tuesday morning. In Arizona, election officials said the count could take more than a week because a bipartisan processing board had to certify mail-in ballot signatures. If any ballots are questioned, the law allows five days for the ballot to be reviewed and tallied.