Debunking Voting Misinformation Concerning the Midterm Elections

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Mike Lindell, the chief government of MyPillow and a Trump supporter, was featured final week in a number of interviews on the video-sharing website Rumble saying that voting machines had been linked to the web and had been tampered with to steal elections. One among his interviews on Rumble was seen greater than 20,000 instances.

Over the previous month, there have been greater than 365,592 mentions of “voter fraud” on Twitter, up 25 p.c from October 2018, in keeping with Zignal.

Claims of voter fraud have usually centered on poll drop containers. One false principle entails Democrats paying individuals to stuff the containers with unlawful ballots. The thought was stoked by the Could launch of the movie “2000 Mules,” which asserted with little proof that unlawful drop field stuffing could possibly be traced via cellphone location information. Safety specialists and former Legal professional Basic William P. Barr have refuted the claims.

Final month, Melody Jennings, a Trump supporter and the founding father of CleanElectionsUSA, an activist group that has unfold unfounded rumors of unlawful drop-box stuffing, warned on Reality Social that “mules” — or individuals who had been allegedly vote-trafficking — had been “doing their factor” at drop containers in Maricopa County. She and different conspiracy theorists falsely mentioned these mules had stuffed containers with unlawful ballots and referred to as for volunteers to look at over the containers. Her put up was shared greater than 3,000 instances and appreciated 7,400 instances.

Conspiracy theories concerning the dealing with of ballots by election officers are additionally circulating on social media. Based on one unsubstantiated principle, election officers are purposely complicated voters over the sorts of pens that can be utilized to mark ballots — and declaring that ballots marked with Sharpie pens aren’t counted.

These false claims, which have circulated since 2020, resurfaced in July when a Maricopa County election workplace despatched an advisory suggesting that voters use felt-tip pens on their ballots. The advisory created a backlash on-line, with a number of voters posting on Twitter and Fb that they’d as a substitute use blue ballpoint pens as a result of they frightened that ballots marked with felt-tip pens supplied at polling stations wouldn’t be counted.

False rumors of voting by useless individuals and unlawful immigrants have lengthy circulated, together with after the 2020 election in states akin to Arizona, Virginia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. In all of those states, a small fraction of ballots had been solid within the names of useless people.

The trope has reared its head once more on-line forward of the midterms.

Politicians together with Consultant Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, have lately mentioned with out proof that Democrats need immigrants who’re in america illegally to vote.



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