Until the polls open on election day, baseless claims News of voter fraud had been circulating on social media for months, foster doubt About the purity of elections.
Posts on X and other platforms are showing up, pointing to disruptions like technical issues with voting machines, power outages and spelling errors on ballots as examples of an alleged conspiracy. And at 4:30 p.m. on Election Day, former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that there was “much discussion about massive fraud” in Pennsylvania – which officials said “No factual basis whatsoever.,
But as the votes were tallied and it became clear that Trump was headed for a decisive victory, researchers say the flood of posts questioning the integrity of the election subsided.
Max Reid, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said, “I think this shows that when these narratives serve a purpose they are pushed forward and they often have counterproductive consequences for efforts to dispute them.” Let's set the stage.” “And then once that stage is established and those claims are no longer needed, they are no longer pursued.”
the change was too rapid Elon Musk's The “Election Integrity Community,” a group of about 65,000 people started by the platform's owner's political action committee, encourages members to report “voter fraud or irregularities.”
The group had already become a repository Speculations and baseless rumors Before election day. When voting began, hundreds of posts were shared per hour until the early hours of Wednesday morning, when the race was called for Trump in Pennsylvania, all but ending the way to victory for Vice President Kamala Harris.
After that the postings became very less.
Reed's team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue also found that mentions of voting machines on the platform in Pennsylvania and Michigan increased on Tuesday afternoon, but remained non-existent by Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday morning, a software error temporarily shut down voting machines in Cambria County in southwestern Pennsylvania, population about 131,000. Voters used paper ballots and after a court order extended voting hours from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., but some people on social media baselessly suggested that technical issues were something nefarious, a county Trump had won by wide margins in both of the previous two elections.
Danielle Lee Tompson, who leads the Center for an Informed Public's research on election rumors at the University of Washington, said the story around Pennsylvania voting machines mirrors the conversation around election issues in Maricopa County, Arizona in 2022. In that election, some ballots were printed with ink too light to be read by the tabulator, so they were placed in a secure box and counted separately at the state elections headquarters. Claims that the errors were deliberately inflicted trial The results were challenged which were later rejected.
“On Election Day, we can always expect there to be irregularities or glitches or problems at polling places,” Tompson said. “The question is whether those issues will translate into a larger narrative that there is election fraud.”
Although the volume of election rumors has reduced drastically, false claims are still spreading about races that have not been called yet. In Arizona, where Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake trails Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego, social users on the right are using the fact that Gallego had received more votes than Harris as of Friday to cast doubt on the validity of her lead. .
Meanwhile, polling data is being distorted by both the Left and the Right to cast doubt on the election results. While millions of votes are still being counted, some point to higher turnout in 2020 as evidence that there are 20 million “missing votes”. On the right, some claim this is proof that 2020 was stolen from Trump; On the left, some say this is grounds for a recount.
But according to research by both Thomson and Reed, the volume of posts questioning Harris' defeat was nowhere near “Stop the Steal” efforts following Trump's 2020 election loss. No elected official cast doubt on the outcome, just as Trump refused to contest the election when he lost in 2020. Harris urged all Americans to accept the results of the election. concession speech On Wednesday.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” Harris said. “And anyone who wants public trust must respect it.”