How Crowdsourced Voter Fraud Claims Could Affect the Election: NPR

People wait in line to cast their votes in New York on October 26, 2024. Online, social media users make unverified and false claims about voting that can quickly go viral.

Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

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Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

As Election Day approaches, social media is lighting up and users are searching for evidence of election fraud. Some of these baseless claims are poised to become grist for Republican lawsuits challenging the results if former President Donald Trump loses.

One hub of these efforts is an “Election Integrity Community” on of 2024.”

The feed is full of unverified claims and rumors. A video of a Republican pollster suggesting – falsely – that ineligible non-citizens can vote as long as they provide a driver’s license has been viewed more than a million times. Other users were suspicious when they were told by election workers to put their ballots in mailboxes, which have been the subject of baseless conspiracy theories since 2020. A wave of reports claimed that voting machines in Georgia and elsewhere were flipping votes, which both the Georgia Secretary of State and the manufacturer have debunked.

“What we’re seeing is a kind of motivated misinterpretation where people (who) are already skeptical about whether elections are reliable. Some of their favorite candidates have told them in some cases that we can’t trust the elections. results… if that candidate doesn’t win,” said Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, which tracks election rumors.

Viral false claims can fuel lawsuits

While people also collected alleged evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, those disputing the election results are more willing to exploit the material this time, Starbird said.

“There are attorneys ready to incorporate these rumors, misconceptions, and misinterpretations into affidavits on Election Day or the days after, and use them to challenge whether certain votes are being counted in certain places… or to use that. to try to pressure election officials and others not to certify the results,” Starbird said.

Researchers and election officials say one of the most prominent stories circulating this year is the baseless claim that non-citizens vote or are allowed to vote in federal elections, giving Democrats an unfair advantage in what is expected to be a very tight race will be.

That baseless narrative has emerged as the main focus of Republican efforts to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results if Trump loses, election law experts say. States have used it as a justification for trying to purge people from the population roll. Thousands of eligible voters in Alabama were caught up in such an effort, according to court records. Eligible voters in Texas and Virginia have also been removed, although the total number of those affected is not yet clear.

The voices of naturalized citizens are not the only ones challenged by baseless claims. Far-right outlet The Gateway Pundit claimed that the methods some members of the military and Americans living abroad used to vote are vulnerable to hacking, and accused Democrats of misusing foreign ballots to fabricate votes.

Those rumors also arose in 2020 and were debunked. A video that Gateway Pundit cited as evidence was actually part of an Iranian influence operation issued by the Justice Department in 2021.

But Trump recently repeated the false claim on his Truth Social platform. Republicans have filed lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of some ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, although these challenges have been unsuccessful.

Misinterpreting real life events, viewing routine work as suspicious

Many other false narratives about voting are also recycled from past years. Rumors claiming that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems would flip votes have spread on social media in recent days. That company was the target of conspiracy theories in 2020 that ultimately resulted in a $787 million defamation settlement by Fox News and multiple ongoing lawsuits.

The posts accusing the company claimed that the poster or a friend or family member was ultimately able to vote as they pleased when they noticed that the machine’s printed ballot did not match their chosen candidate.

But while voters could choose their preferred candidates, prominent figures including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who regularly repeated conspiratorial narratives, continued to amplify charges that Dominion machines could alter votes.

In statements to NPR, Dominion Voting Systems said its machines did not change votes and pointed to a page on its website containing general rumors about the company titled “Setting the Record Straight.”

A voter places a ballot in the ballot box at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix, Arizona on October 23, 2024. With both parties telling their supporters to vote early, concerns about the ballot boxes are resurfacing.

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Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

Other easily dispelled falsehoods have quickly gone viral. Republican activist Cliff Maloney, who organizes door knockers to get Pennsylvania Republicans to vote early, said one of his contacts identified 53 voters registered at a convent in Erie County where, according to the contact, no one lived. The convent — which actually houses more than 50 nuns — quickly issued a response correcting the claim, and CNN spoke to the sisters who were on the list of registered voters.

But Maloney’s response to the fact check was to double down on his claim. “WRONG,” he wrote on

Ignoring existing checks and remedies is another common theme among those trying to sow doubt about election results, University of Washington researchers wrote in a September blog post.

High tension inspires great vigilance

With both parties telling their supporters to vote early, concerns about the ballot boxes have also resurfaced. Drop boxes have been set on fire in three states. Starbird noted that rumors are starting to circulate around the incidents, but she said they, as well as isolated incidents of stolen ballots, miss a larger point.

“This is really problematic for individuals, but it is unlikely to change the outcome of the election,” she said, noting that one of the rhetorical strategies of election deniers is to exaggerate the impact of events.

Starbird worries about what the constant vigilance about voter fraud is doing to a country that has for years been steeped in Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a worldview that has been embraced by many Republicans and has undermined many Americans’ confidence in has affected voting.

“What this can do at its best is quickly identify problems so election officials can fix them. And that’s what we want,” she said. “What happens in the worst case is that these things get caught up in these kinds of false narratives, they amplify them and people start to lose confidence in the process.”

And that, Starbird said, “can distract election workers and election officials from real issues.”