AMERIKA

Election officials are fighting a tsunami of voting conspiracy theories

CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY and CHRISTINE FERNANDO
Wed 23 October 2024 




Election 2024 Wisconsin
Voters cast their ballots at the Frank P. Zeidler Municipal Building during the first day of Wisconsin's in-person absentee voting Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

ATLANTA (AP) — Voting machines reversing votes. More voters registered than people eligible. Large numbers of noncitizens voting.

With less than two weeks before Election Day, a resurgence in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting is forcing state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors and explaining how elections are run at the same time they're overseeing early voting and preparing for Nov. 5.

“Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” says Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.”


This year’s election is the first presidential contest since former President Donald Trump began spreading lies about widespread voter fraud costing him reelection in 2020. The false claims, which he continues to repeat, have undermined public confidence in elections and in the people who oversee them among a broad swath of Republican voters . Investigations have found no widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines four years ago, and each of the battlegrounds states where Trump disputed his loss has affirmed Democrat J oe Biden's win.

In the past week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed a voting machine had changed a voter’s ballot in her Georgia district during early voting, and Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, has promoted various conspiracy theories about voting machines and voter fraud both online and at a rally for Trump in Pennsylvania.

The floodgates are “very much” open, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with state and local election officials.

“This is making election officials' lives much more difficult,” he said.

Eric Olsen, who oversees elections in Prince William County, Virginia, said combatting misinformation has become an important and challenging part of the job.

“It’s really difficult from our position, a lot of times, because social media feels like a giant wave coming at you and we’re in a little canoe with a paddle,” he said. “But we have to do that work.”

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly attempted to sow doubt about the upcoming election – something he did ahead of his two previous bids for the White House. Even after he won in 2016, he claimed he had lost the popular vote because of a flood of illegal votes and he formed a presidential advisory commission to investigate. The commission disbanded without finding any widespread fraud.

This year, Trump claims that Democrats will cheat again and uses “Too Big to Rig” as a rallying cry to encourage his supporters to vote. Election experts see it as laying the groundwork to again challenge the election should he lose.

Spreading bogus accusations about elections has other consequences. It's already led to a wave of harassment, threats and turnover of election workers as well as the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The conspiracy theories that have surfaced in recent weeks are not new. There have long been claims of “vote flipping,” with the most recent ones surfacing in Georgia and Tennessee.

A claim in Georgia’s Whitfield County was highlighted by Greene on Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” show. Jones has a history of spreading falsehoods and was ordered to pay $1.5 billion for his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a hoax.

County election officials issued a statement, noting the case involved one voter out of 6,000 ballots that had been cast since early voting began. The ballot was spoiled, and the voter cast a replacement that was counted. Officials said there was no problem with the voting machine.

Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said every report they’ve seen so far of someone saying their printed ballot didn’t reflect their selections on the touchscreen voting machine has been a result of voter error.

“There is zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote,” he said. “Are there elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it? That’s the main situation we have seen. There is literally zero -- and I’m saying this to certain congresspeople in this state -- zero evidence of machines flipping votes. That claim was a lie in 2020 and it’s a lie now.”

In Shelby County, Tennessee, county election officials said human error was to blame for reports of votes being changed. Voters had been using their fingers instead of a stylus to mark their selections on voting machines, officials said.

In Washington state, Republican Jerrod Sessler, who is running for the state’s 4th Congressional District seat, shared a video on social media this week that claimed to show how easily fraudulent ballots can be created. But the video did not make clear that voter information on each ballot is checked against the state's voter list.

"A ballot returned using fake voter registration information would not be counted and is illegal in Washington state,” Charlie Boisner, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State's Office, said in an email.

Musk recently invoked Dominion Voting Systems as part of his remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania, seeming to suggest its equipment was not trustworthy. Dominion has been at the center of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election and settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year for $787 million over false claims aired repeatedly on the network. The judge in the case said it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations made by Trump allies on the network were true.

In a statement, Dominion said it was “closely monitoring claims around the Nov. 2024 election” and was “fully prepared to defend our company & our customers against lies and those who spread them.”

A request for comment from Musk was not immediately returned.

Musk, who has endorsed Trump, has repeatedly pushed misinformation about voter fraud to his 200 million followers on the X platform, where false information spreads largely unchecked.

He has often sparred online with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Recently, the two tangled over Musk’s claim that there were more registered voters in Michigan, a presidential battleground state, than people eligible to vote. Benson said Musk was including in his count inactive voters who are scheduled for removal. A federal judge on Tuesday tossed out a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee claiming problems with the state’s voter list.

During an interview last month, Benson said she was disheartened to see someone in Musk’s position repeating false information.

“If he was sincerely committed, as he says he is, to ensuring people have access to information, then I would hope that he would amplify the truthful information -- the factual, accurate information -- about the security of our elections instead of just amplifying conspiracy theories and in a way that directs the ire of many of his followers onto us as individual election administrators,” Benson said. “It’s something that we didn’t have to deal with in 2020 that creates a new battlefront and challenge for us.”

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Fernando reported from Chicago. Associated Press writers Kate Brumback in Atlanta and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.

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'Same playbook': Voting falsehoods mire US election

Daniel FUNKE / AFP USA
Wed 23 October 2024 

Four years after a US presidential race awash with misinformation, Americans face more of the same in the closing weeks of this year's campaign, with claims about ballot irregularities and fraud likely to dominate.

With conspiracy theories already bubbling in the too-close-to-call contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the vote count is expected to take days, giving oxygen to online rancor about the electoral process.

Social media users in states such as Texas are already misrepresenting early voting machine errors as evidence of wrongdoing. Republican former president Trump has also repeatedly accused Democrats of importing migrants to vote illegally for Harris on Election Day, November 5.

That narrative has gained massive traction, adding to years of election denialism after 2020, when Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden but insisted falsely and against all evidence that he had won -- a baseless claim he continues to make today.

Despite being repeatedly debunked, eight in 10 Republicans endorse the notion that undocumented immigrants could help put Harris in the White House, according to a recent survey from the multi-university Bright Line Watch initiative (archived here).

"It's the same playbook from 2016 and then again in 2020 and now 2024," said Lisa Deeley, vice chair of the Philadelphia City Commissioners in the state of Pennsylvania, which has faced a barrage of misinformation (archived here).

Adding to the noise is a string of fake celebrity endorsements, deceptively edited videos of campaign events and satire passed off as real news.

Screenshots from social media

Conspiracy theories about two assassination attempts against Trump during the campaign also abound, with more than a third of Democrats believing they were staged, according to Bright Line Watch.

The 2020 election was marred by false claims of hacked voting machines, dead people voting and illegal overnight ballot dumps, culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters.

Despite no courts, audits or recounts surfacing evidence of widespread fraud, experts say this time they expect a deluge of similar falsehoods and AI-generated visuals, as well as premature declarations of victory.

"One piece of misinformation that is absolutely predictable is the false impression that we should know on election night who won and there is something wrong if we don't," said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University (archived here).

"The predictions that you get are really only that. And if those predictions take a while longer, it's not a sign that the election's broken -- it's a sign that the election's working."
'Kind of laughable'

The last presidential election was the most secure in American history, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (archived here).

Of the tens of millions of ballots cast in 2020 and during midterm elections in 2022, there have been only a few dozen criminal fraud convictions, according to a database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation (archived here).

Studies compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, which reviewed fraud cases before 2020, also found wrongdoing is uncommon (archived here).

A person casts a ballot during early voting at a polling station in Black Mountain, North Carolina on October 18, 2024
Allison JoyceAFP

Americans who do commit such crimes face harsh penalties, such as fines of thousands of dollars or even prison time.

"With all the scrutiny on elections these days, the idea that there would be widespread voter fraud is kind of laughable," said Charles Stewart, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Lab (archived here).
Safeguarding the vote

While each state makes its own election rules, all have security measures at each step of the voting process.

In Arizona's Maricopa County, which Biden won back from Republicans in 2020, absentee ballots undergo rigorous signature verification.

"From there, we have bipartisan teams who then extract the ballot from the envelope, and that's what gives us the secret ballot," Deputy Elections Director Jennifer Liewer told AFP (archived here). Those who vote early can track their ballot "every step of the way."

There are strict chain-of-custody procedures for ballots, and many jurisdictions livestream the count -- including Fulton County, Georgia, another swing state flashpoint.

"We want to make sure things are open, that the public knows what's open to the public -- that they can come and see those things and not let somebody else post a video with false narratives," said Nadine Williams, the county's director of registration and elections (archived here).

For those who still doubt the process, Deeley of the Philadelphia City Commissioners recommends getting more involved by volunteering as a poll worker.

"Then they can take part in their own democracy," she said.

Election officials are hustling to fight misinformation in real time as early voting begins

Sara Murray, Holmes Lybrand and Marshall Cohen, CNN
Tue 22 October 2024 


Voters walk towards a polling station to cast their ballots in early voting for the presidential election in Scottsdale, Arizona, on October 10.


The election misinformation machine is already ramping up in critical battleground states as early voting gets underway, and election officials are hustling to combat falsehoods in real time.

Conservatives have been sharing uncorroborated instances of machines flipping votes, claims of widespread fraud in mail ballots and suggestions that election officials are subverting the process if it takes multiple days to count ballots. The claims are ricocheting around social media as voters hit the polls. They mirror claims that former President Donald Trump and his allies spread around the 2020 election as they tried to head off Trump’s loss to now-President Joe Biden.

State and local election officials, however, are also preparing for a deluge of false and misleading claims, and are actively trying to address issues before they go far.

“Our humble ask is that before people swallow whole what they see in their social media feed, they at least verify it against a trusted source,” Minnesota Secretary of State and president of the National Association of Secretaries of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told reporters this week.

Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Alliance for Securing Democracy who’s focused on election-related disinformation, said that some of the push is needed because social media companies have stepped back from challenging false claims.

“It’s reassuring how much better election officials have gotten around communication in advance of the election,” Schafer said. “There definitely wasn’t the same level of interaction four years ago … in trying to communicate any changes in how voting will work this time, and, to the extent possible, short-circuit some of the false election narratives we know will be coming.”

Here are four examples from this month as early voting continues in earnest:
Machines switching votes?

“We have received a report that twice, persons voting on a machine had the machine alter their vote from Trump to Harris,” the Washoe County Republican Party in Nevada claimed in an email blast that was flagged on social media by local political reporter Jon Ralston.

It was reminiscent of the many debunked voting machine claims from 2020. And while those conspiracy theories continue to swirl online, a spokesperson for Washoe County told CNN there have been no specific complaints about machines flipping votes since early voting began.

Claims of voter fraud also circulated in Texas this week as early voting began in the state. In one instance, shared by some right-wing personalities on social media, a man claimed that his vote had been switched on the voting machine from one candidate to another, telling people to “check your paper ballots.” Trump allies who shared the video claimed that Texas’ Tarrant County used a voting system that had vulnerabilities and led to the alleged switch.

The county’s Elections Administration Department issued a statement Tuesday pushing back on these claims, saying that in one reported instance, a voter reviewed their printed ballot and “found that it did not correctly reflect his choice for President.”

Another ballot was provided and the issue was resolved, the department said, adding that they had “no reason to believe votes are being switched by the voting system.”
Counting votes in Georgia

In Georgia, several right-wing accounts seized on a CBS interview with GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over the weekend, in which he said the state should be able to report 70% to 75% of the vote total by 8 p.m. on Election Day. He noted the state would still need to tally overseas and military ballots, which can be received until the Friday after Election Day and could help determine the winner in a razor-thin race.

But Raffensperger’s critics twisted his comments to make it seem as if he was suggesting 25% of the remaining vote would come from overseas or military ballots and that there was no chance the state would be able to report results for three days – claims Raffensperger did not make.

“I know you’re up to something & it is going to all come to light,” Kylie Jane Kremer, a Trump supporter who helped to organize the January 6, 2021, rally on the Ellipse that precluded the attack on the US Capitol, said on X. “You don’t just belong in jail, you belong under the jail, for subverting Georgian’s right to secure, free & fair elections.”

Kremer told CNN, “Raffensperger is putting out confusing information to the masses on voting,” but said she believes all overseas and military ballots should be counted.

Raffensperger responded to some of the criticism on X, reiterating that most of the early vote would be tallied by 8 p.m. and Election Day votes would be reported later that evening.

But the inaccurate extrapolations had already taken off and, much to the disappointment of officials in Georgia, Utah Sen. Mike Lee was among those criticizing Raffensperger.

Lee, a Republican, posted “Just…no” on X, as he shared a post inaccurately claiming that Raffensperger said the results wouldn’t be ready for three days.

Raffensperger’s appearance on CBS came as he too was debunking a claim that machines were flipping votes.

“We’re going to respond quickly to these sorts of things in 2024 because it’s not supported by the facts,” Raffensperger said. “The equipment’s working.”
Mail ballots in Arizona

In Arizona, officials were also hitting back at the notion that taking multiple days to count the ballots somehow equates to election fraud.

“Any Secretary of State in any state who gets on TV today and says it’ll take days to count the votes is a cheater, a traitor, and should be arrested,” a prominent right-wing account called Catturd posted on X.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, shot back: “That’s one possibility. A different possibility is that different states have different state laws.”

In Arizona, for instance, experts expect hundreds of thousands of voters to return their mail ballots on Election Day, which takes time to process and count. Other states don’t have the same kind of deluge of Election Day mail ballots.
Unattended ballots in Minnesota

In another instance that left officials scrambling, officials in Minneapolis over the weekend tried to mitigate the fallout of a picture circulating on social media showing boxes of unattended ballots in a parking lot.

Local GOP leaders and pro-Trump accounts raised suspicions on Friday about the incident, spreading the photo and questioning the legitimacy of mail-in voting, which nonpartisan experts say is a secure process that isn’t plagued by widespread fraud.

Within hours, Hennepin County officials issued a statement acknowledging the “unacceptable” security lapse – and posted 18 minutes of surveillance footage to YouTube, showing that nobody touched the unguarded ballots.

“Mis- and disinformation is one of the biggest challenges facing elections officials right now, and getting out ahead of rumors as quickly as we can is our only hope of combatting them,” Hennepin County elections director Ginny Gelms told CNN.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen, Tierney Sneed and Bob Ortega contributed to this report.

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