Don't be fooled: 5 types of misinformation we expect this election season

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
Updated

Add a third entry to the list of inevitable things in life: Death, taxes and baseless claims of election fraud.

The countdown to November's presidential election begins in earnest with the Super Tuesday primaries, and that means social media feeds will be filled in the coming months with some predictable claims. Stop us if you've heard these before...

  • The election was stolen due to voter fraud

  • Votes were added/subtracted due to "hacking"

  • Changing vote totals are proof of cheating

  • Partisan election officials are skewing vote tallies

  • There were more votes than registered voters

Each of these claims has surfaced repeatedly in recent election cycles, but the online uproar stemmed from people unfamiliar with how the election system works or how to interpret election data.

USA TODAY has debunked dozens of false election-related claims stemming from those themes, which stand out for their prominence, persistence and significance.

Study up to be ready when they come around again.

Claim No. 1: Voter fraud

Experts call claims of widespread voter fraud deeply exaggerated.

"By and large, fraud is largely a made-up problem," said Paul Smith, senior vice president at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog organization.

There were no indications of systemic problems with voter fraud during either the 2020 election or the midterms two years later, according to state-level reviews of those elections. Still, former President Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party made persistent, baseless claims about it.

Many states pushed through election-related changes to address those concerns. Some now require voters to show photo identification. Others created state-level units to look for potential problems.

The next wave of fraud claims figures to be rooted in the crisis at the southern U.S. border, said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice. For example, Trump baselessly asserted in January that Democrats are encouraging migrants to flow into the U.S. illegally to register them to vote.

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections. Anyone caught lying about their citizenship status when they register to vote faces punishments that include fines, incarceration and deportation. States must audit their voter rolls and remove anyone who is ineligible, which includes immigrants in the country illegally.

Trump also raised questions about voting by mail, baselessly claiming in a Feb. 20 interview with Fox News that "if you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud."

That's not true: Mail-in voting comes with several additional security measures to prevent it. Those range from verifying that the only people who can request ballots are registered voters, to a process that links every ballot to an eligible voter, according to previous USA TODAY reporting.

Prior fact checks on voter fraud:

Claim No. 2: The election is ‘hacked’

Election officials at the federal, state and local levels have safeguards in place at three stages – before, during and after Election Day – to prevent hacking from taking place, according to the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“There are multiple layers of security there that we’re constantly checking,” Norden said.

Among them, according to CISA: States routinely test and certify their voting machines and conduct checks to make sure ballots are properly counted before election results are finalized. And the overwhelming majority of people voting do so on paper ballots. That creates a document trail that may be checked for accuracy.

“We audit those paper votes after the election to make sure that they match what the machine is telling us the vote total is,” Norden said.

And to further limit the possibility of cyber interference, many states do not allow voting machines to connect to the Internet or even be equipped with modems.

Concerns about hacking sparked false claims from conservative pundits that voting machines deleted Trump votes and changed them to Biden. That led to lawsuits from voting technology companies such as Dominion Voting Systems, which sued Fox News for defamation and ultimately settled the case for $787.5 million.

Prior fact checks on hacking allegations:

Claim No. 3: Rapidly changing vote totals

An abrupt increase in a candidate's vote count as ballots are counted on Election Day does not mean something fraudulent happened. It's important to remember that not all votes are counted at the same time, experts say.

Several factors can affect tabulation times, according to CISA. Those include administration policy changes at the state or local level and protocols put into place during the pandemic. The agency noted that all election night results are unofficial, having not yet completed the various reviews and doublechecks.

The pace at which votes come in for both parties also changes based on when a state is allowed to begin counting its mail-in ballots.

False claims of “ballot dumps” circulated in 2020 after mail-in ballots were counted late in the day in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. With few exceptions, those states do not allow workers to open mail ballots before Election Day.

"It was a natural phenomenon of different categories of votes showing up at different times, in a world in which mail voting ... was skewed very (Democratic) because the Republicans had been told not to do it," Smith said.

While mistakes do happen at times when votes are counted, those are typically a result of simple human error, not foul play, and there are processes in place to catch and fix them, officials note. Sometimes, that happens on Election Day. Other times, mistakes aren’t spotted until the canvass that is part of the certification process. Those typically take place in the days or weeks that follow the election.

And the mechanism used to count those votes also matters.

Some studies show hand counts are less reliable and more mistake-prone – to say nothing of being slower – than machine tallies. Even so, some Republicans have pushed states to move away from electronic ballot tabulators and return to hand-counting, something the Brennan Center opposes.

Prior fact checks on vote totals:

Claim No. 4: Partisan election officials

No two states run their elections exactly the same way, and there's even plenty of variation between the setups within a state. But experts point to established checks and balances that prevent election officials from taking partisan actions.

In most states, voters choose the chief election official. That is most often the secretary of state, but in some states it's the lieutenant governor or an appointee by the governor, lawmakers or the state’s elections board.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have a board or commission that oversees elections. Those are constructed to keep out politics and to have both parties represented, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“Election administration is – even if there is a top official – conducted in a bipartisan way,” Norden said. “And you have, again, multiple, multiple checks to ensure that no one person can do anything that’s going to cause problems in the system.”

Many states incorporate partisan balance into various stages of the process. For example, Arizona requires pairings of one Democrat and one Republican to review each absentee ballot that the tabulator can't read to determine how it should be counted.

Prior fact checks on election officials:

Claim No. 5: More votes than voters

Several versions of this claim have circulated since 2020. They’re all baseless, and they tend to rely on numbers that are incomplete or just plain wrong.

"To suggest that there's more votes cast than registrations is absurd, and it has never happened," Smith said.

For example, Trump’s false claim that the number of votes in Pennsylvania in 2020 exceeded the number of voters by more than 200,000 was based on an incomplete voter registration database that was missing the state's two largest counties – Philadelphia and Allegheny counties – The New York Times reported in 2021.

Some of these claims fail to factor in states that allow same-day voter registration, so they're comparing vote totals to outdated registries. Sometimes, a claim is both false and based on an inadequate set of data.

For example, a U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio wrongly asserted that in 2020 there were 5 million more votes cast than voters, and pinned the claim on U.S. Census Bureau data, according to a PolitiFact fact check. In reality, numbers from the bureau show 168 million registered voters and 155 million votes, a difference of about 13 million.

But there's a better source of election-related figures than the Census Bureau: The U.S. Election Assistance Commission collects data directly from the states and reported more than 209 million active registered voters that year compared to 161 million ballots cast.

Prior fact checks on voter counts:

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Election misinformation is everywhere. Here's our guide to spotting it

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