UPDATED: Rumors, conspiracy theories, and disinformation about "millions of missing votes" and voting machine fraud

Last updated November 12.. See the update log below for details.

"Election fraud conspiracies from the left are spreading like wildfire right now on Threads. Hundreds of posts are flooding my feed, many with search hashtags above promoting more conspiracies."

– Jason Velazquez, on mastodon.social, November 7

After seeing Jason's posts I went looking on Threads and my oh my, there sure is a lot of this going around. Meanwhile, back in reality, votes are still getting counted (when these rumors started ramping up, there were over ten million uncounted ballots in California alone) and turnout will probably wind up fairly close to the record levels of 2020. And Republicans are trying to use false claims of election fraud to overturn Ruben Gallego's victory in the Arizona Senate election.

Non-partisan election integrity experts are confident that even though there were (as always) some voting problems, there wasn't widespread fraud – and that there were safeguards in place to detect it if there were. As Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly said on November 6,

"Importantly, we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure."

And Ishan Mehta of Common Cause – which had thousands of volunteers in all 50 states monitoring the election at polling sites and vote-counting centres, says “there is no evidence that any votes disappeared.”

But, many people don't know that it always takes time to get the final vote totals. So with emotions running high in the aftermath of the election, disinformation purveyors are taking advantage of the opportunity to get well-intentioned people to help amplify conspiracy theories. University of Washington Center for the Informed Public's Post Election Rumors noted that the rumors about election fraud in 2024 are coming from both sides of the political spectrum ... which makes sense to me:

• Many Democrats are shocked and looking for ways to explain a disastrous result that they didn't expect
• Republicans are taking advatantage of the opportunity to try to steal the Arizona Senate race, positioning this unfounded claiming as"evidence" of election fraud in 2020

Like most effective disinformation campaigns, there's a small kernel of truth here: there were (as always) some real examples of problems with voting machines and vote-by-mail ballots, as well as shenanigans including bomb threats to dozens of polling places. That's a problem, but all the reports so far say that the number of people who weren't able to vote as a result of this is relatively small – not that this is okay, but phrasing it in terms of "millions of missing votes" is a very misleading exaggeration. And there isn't any evidence at all of tampering with voter tabulation machines, as I've seen some people claiming.

Don't get me wrong, multiple voter suppression techniques actually were used to keep people from voting – purging voters from rolls, felon disenfranchisement, 6-hour lines, texts with false information, voter intimidation, voter id laws, signature challenges, etc etc etc. But that's not what these conspiracy allegations are focusing on.

At least so far, we're only seeing scattered examples of this on Bluesky and the Fediverse. That could change, though, so please don't help out the conspiracy theorists!

If you see allegations of "millions of missing votes" or voting machine fraud, please don't amplify them! Instead:

• If it's somebody you know, send them a private message letting them know that they're unintentionally amplifying a false rumor. Feel free to include a link to this article, or to UWCIP's Post Election Rumors writeup. If they're progressive or a Democrat, let them know that right-wingers are using this rumor to claim that Biden didn't win in 2020. Then ask them to take the post down (or to unshare it if they've amplified somebody else).
• If it's not somebody you know, and you're on the Fediverse or Bluesky, report it to the moderators as disinformation. If you're not sure how to report it, no worries: there are instructions (with screenshots!) on how to report disinformation at the end of 5 ways to fight post-election disinformation on Bluesky and the Fediverse

"Rumoring is collective sensemaking ... And, for cases of harmful false rumors, rumor correction is not just about getting people the right facts. It also requires helping people access frames that will result in more accurate interpretations.

Conspiracy theorizing is a patterned and constrained form of sensemaking where individuals and groups repeatedly anchor on a small number of “conspiracy” frames ...

Disinformation is a manipulated form of sensemaking where motivated actors intentionally work to shape the outcomes of the sensemaking process to support their goals and objectives"

– Facts, frames, and (mis)interpretations: Understanding rumors as collective sensemaking, Kate Starbird, UWICP

Democrats attempting to make sense of an election loss that surprised so many people is a great example of the kind of collective sensemaking Starbird and the UWICP discuss, and its not surprising that there are rumors. Clearly though there's also some disinformation involved here. What are the goals and objectives of the people behind it? There's no way to know for sure but three obvious possibilities include:

• Republicans are trying to use false claims of "election fraud" in the Arizona as the Arizona Senate election, so claims of election fraud elsewhere work to their advantage
• Republicans are also still trying to bolstering false claims of 2020 election fraud (discussed in Post Election Rumors).
• this false narrative fits right in with the multi-year campaign by Russia and fascists in the US have to destroy public trust in the election process here
• focusing attention on an alleged fraud that didn't occur is a good way to divert attention from all voter suppression that really has occurred and has been steadily ramping up ever since Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voing Rights Act – and got even worse this year after Republicans blocked legislation that could have provided voters and election officials with more protection.

At any rate, whether or not people sharing this are intentionally trying to promote conspiracy theories, that's the effect. So please don't do that!

Update log

November 10: originally published

November 12: updated with more of a focus on false claims about Arizona election fraud and quote from Jen Easterly of CISA

Ongoing: minor cleanups including typos, rewording, etc.