Election Rumors and Conspiracism

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Kevin Foster, and today is election day in the United States, provided you're listening when this comes out. Rather than talking about candidates, races, ballot measures, all the things there will be plenty of chatter about, I want to have a discussion about the ongoing problem of election rumors and misinformation. The 2026 general election will have no shortage of rigged election rumors and conspiracy theories. The lead-up to the election has been full of erroneous claims of non-citizen voting and mail-in voting conspiracism, frequently from the president himself. About a week before the election, Trump announced on Truth Social a $ 1 million bounty for reports of voter fraud in the current or previous elections

that lead to a conviction. I don't expect any of this to slow down. In fact, it may well get worse in the coming weeks. From coordinated efforts to undermine faith in elections to unofficial alt-government agency accounts conspiracy posting, it's going to be a mess. Which is exactly why I brought on a few experts to help parse through the flaming garbage pile that is the election rumor mill.

I interviewed Stephen Prohaska and Danielle Lee Thompson of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, or CIP. Prohaska is a sixth-year PhD candidate studying disinformation, and Thompson is the research manager for CIP, leading a team studying institutional communication and rumors around U.S. elections. Their research is a bit different from many academic institutions and involves a lot of rapid response work. It has also gotten them in hot water with a cast of election deniers, including Project Veritas, who unsuccessfully sued some members of CIP for their reporting on allegations of voter fraud in 2020. For those who don't know, Project Veritas is a far-right organization

that promotes disinformation and election conspiracism. It was founded by James O'Keefe. who, according to Reuters, recently filmed a stunt in Minnesota with right-wing influencer Cam Higbee, landing them both with felony unlawful voting and identity theft charges, proposing as registered voters at polling places during Minnesota's August primary. That's not really relevant to the episode, I just think it's really funny and ironic. But anyway, I want to be clear, I'm not saying in this episode that we have completely free and fair elections or We don't know what's going to happen today or in the upcoming weeks, whether ICE will intimidate people at the polls, what Trump will post, etc.

This episode is about trying to understand what's happening and how not to pour gasoline on the fire. So without further ado, here's the interview. I want to talk a little bit about your typology around elections. Why do you use the word rumors to describe elections? All these things that are popping up around the election. What's the difference between that and misinformation or conspiracy? And I think this would also be a good spot to talk about some of the spot the lie kind of methodology that you have.

And Danielle, you can kick us off. So.

I think if you look back 10 years ago, there was a really interesting moment where we had a lot of new things happening in American society. A new president who was super populist, aka Donald Trump. We had these online platforms that brought quick information into the palms of our hands in this very intimate way. And folks were really wondering... Like, why did this election happen? What's going on?

There's hate speech on the internet that's super visible. There's false information on the internet that's super visible. And I think that there was a real interest across society, whether it was civil society, academia, journalism, and other kinds of, you could think of it as like, ivory tower truth organizations interested in confronting this informational challenge. And so I think at the moment, folks oftentimes fixated on how like information was true or false. Like, oh my gosh, Trump is saying all these false things. Oh my goodness. Someone said this like terrible thing that we need to moderate and we need to like figure out this problem. So there was a lot of, I think at the time to folks who jumped on this bandwagon of talking about

information as like a disinformation problem or a narrative disorder, or like all of these ways in which we could solve across just elections, but also public health or, uh, climate or other things like this challenge of the public getting false information from smaller outlets or individuals because broadcast media and journalism had just become, uh, I mean, quite frankly, a little bit more under attack or consolidated or going out of business. It's like the nature of how we get information was changing so rapidly. Now, I think like our team, the founders of our center, Kate Starburn and Emma Spiro had gotten their career starts studying data. crisis informatics so this is how information flows on the internet

during crisis moments and they framed it very early on as the study of rumor during crisis events a rumor is an unfounded claim or speculation that doesn't necessarily have evidence or maybe it does have some evidence that isn't verified yet but rumors are really normal things during a crisis event like yeah Everyone wants to know who did it, what did it, what happened, what's going on. And everyone has a take. It's like playing a game of telephone.

And there have been studies for basically the past hundred years of how rumoring dynamics work in American society. Now, sometimes those rumors can be true. They can be false or they can be somewhere. And most of the time, somewhere in between, right? Disinformation is the intentional spread of of false or falsified information in order to mislead the public or to gain or something for gain, some sort of coordination, right? So there's like an intentional element. Misinformation is the spread of false or misleading information, but not necessarily with that intent. So sometimes we've all been guilty of sharing some sort of post online that might be AI generated. Then we find out later that it was

AI generated. Oh, my goodness. Like I accidentally spread some misinformation online. Yeah, that's very different than intentionally spreading like that piece of information in order to mislead the public.

It's the Pink Panther at the Paris protests and stuff. Yeah.

Exactly. And so, but a rumor actually is maybe a little bit more honest to describe what we're studying in the moment because we don't know the intent oftentimes of people spreading certain kinds of information. So it's sort of, a little more honest in these rapidly unfolding moments of high levels of uncertainty, like elections, to call something a rumor.

Because we're not the ones to make that call about the intentionality of that information. Although there's definitely a lot of signs sometimes to what might be a coordinated disinformation campaign versus not.

Yeah.

But yeah. So like we've we've basically been doing this work so long that we have identified six ways that rumors can be potentially misleading. So I'm happy to sort of pass that off to Stephen if you want to talk about it.

Yeah.

Before I jump in that, I'm just going to emphasize the point Danielle made there that like because we're doing rapid response work. We are looking at rumors in real time. We don't know facticity. We don't know intentionality. So as far as like the primary construct for the work that we do in the rapid response setting, rumor is what we are looking at because there is so much information that is uncertain at the time of spread. So just to emphasize that it's really a very useful tool for us.

Yeah.

That has roots in crisis informatics. As Danielle mentioned, we've spent a lot of time looking at election rumors in particular. When we first started in 2020, we didn't actually know everything that we were getting into. There was a lot of stuff that was novel to us. We were researchers. We had some familiarity with rumors in general, online spaces, but we didn't know as much about elections. And so we started seeing very similar rumors online. And even when rumors weren't using the exact same claims, they often seemed to mislead in fairly predictable ways. And so we've actually just published this in our sub stack, what we call the six ways that rigged election rumors mislead. So just like start at the outset. There are cases where there

is no evidence to support a particular claim. However, most of the time in the work that we do and the rumors that we look at, it's pretty rare to have these things that is either fabricated or no evidence. There's usually some sort of like photo or video or the picture of a ballot or a lawsuit that is catalyzing rumoring. It often involves these misinterpretations of the evidence that is available. I think one of the things that we saw last election cycle, and we're seeing again this election cycle, are rumors about Starlink. For example, we're saying there, I think some folks, especially, I think that there's like a Elon Musk documentary coming out claims about somewhat incriminating looking texts about lasers in space, which. It gets into

the realm of conspiracy theories. But in the work that we do, when we see rumors, people will see that, you know, Musk seems to have some sort of conflict of interest. They connect it to voting machines or statistics. And then they start coming up with these theories about, you know, that there's no like solid evidence, but they're coming with these theories about how, yeah, maybe there's Starlink lasers that are manipulating voting machines.

Yeah. Yeah.

The next category here would be like fake or falsified evidence. So this is the truly oftentimes I think when talking about AI, this is what people are really worried about. So deep fakes, which is like synthetically generated videos or photos that look real, but are AI generated. And again, this is one that is like we've seen it and they are increasingly prevalent, certainly compared to 2020, but it's not the primary driver of the rumoring that we see in the work that we do. We're often sometimes seeing kind of low quality photos or videos that are catalyzing rumoring or in this current environment, oftentimes official statements or actions from the administration and that lead audiences to become

either supportive or skeptical of the things that are being said. I think the misinterpreted evidence is the next category for us. And misinterpreted evidence, I think, is one of the more common ones that we see where we see, I think, for example, someone might be ballot harvesting is one of the tropes or the most common claims here. Ballot harvesting actually is an interesting example because there are states that that allow what is legally called ballot harvesting, which is the ability to drop off multiple ballots, usually for a family member. But that is decided on a per state basis. However, it's been kind of wrapped up into a larger narrative that ballot harvesting is illegally and intentionally perpetrated primarily by

Democrat organized groups to collect ballots from different individuals, oftentimes homeless folks, people in retirement homes, certainly commonly non-citizen voters. And that people are illegally dropping off these allegedly false ballots through ballot harvesting. So that's a little bit on the term there.

Yeah.

But oftentimes the evidence for that is like the picture of someone dropping off multiple envelopes that is inherently ambiguous. So it's not really, it doesn't support the claims that people are making based off of evidence that spreads.

Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot about the, I can't remember if this is 2020 or one of the later elections, but I think a lot about the election worker moving the bin full of votes or ballots under a table and then everybody freaking out online about that. That strikes me as misinterpreted evidence or like you see something that, you know, could suggest, but it just ends up spinning up based on narratives that people sort of propagate.

We say at the CIP, everything is a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works. So elections are confusing. Trust me, even on this team rules, there are rule changes. And because in the United States, election rules and laws are adjudicated at the jurisdictional level. Like we've literally thousands of different cases and rule systems and machines in this country about like how people vote. So it's different state by state. And there's a lot of weird objects or protocol or procedures that people don't know what's going on.

So things can change. look very suspicious especially when there's like a mundane object like a backpack or a box and someone takes a picture of that oh my gosh they put the ballot in the backpack or the bag or the box and then they moved it when that's actually just like a really mundane thing that's part of somebody's procedure but you can wrap that up in intentionally mischaracterized way to create this impression that something nefarious is going on when it's just business as usual actually.

I want to talk at some point about malevolent actors and all of this and where this starts to drift into broader conspiracism, but I think it would be valuable to just take a second and Talk about this election. You know, what is new in the election rumor mill? I am curious about the something you mentioned with Trump saying he's going to offer a million dollars for people for reporting fraud or something like that. This fraud.gov. Can we talk a little bit about what's happening right now?

Stephen and I were just talking about this beforehand and there are a couple things. So I'll sort of list them out and then we can go deeper. One is the power dynamics are different. Trump is president this time. He has control over the executive branch and DOJ and has access to powerful lawyers who can sue states.

That's different, right? The power dynamics have changed. That has meant that Secondly, we see a lot more rumoring on the left and in left-leaning or pro-democracy communities who are really anxious around how our elections are going down and if the federal government will interfere. So there's a heightened sense of anxiety so that a lot of the rumoring that we used to see on the right around ballot machines and like screens switching votes or which we saw last week in Tennessee with Dolly Parton's sister saying that voting machine screen was switching her vote like when there was a revenue and she voted how she wanted in the end like there's like hyper anxiety on the left so that's like the second thing and then the third

thing I would say is also we have the addition of prediction markets and profiting that are playing. So that also has added another layer of visualizations and speculation that can be used as evidence of like, oh my gosh, well, the odds were that we see this in the Brazilian election, Bolsonaro was going to win. And then all of a sudden the odds flipped and Lula's winning and the odds are for Lula. It must not, someone must have interfered with this when, Prediction markets are just betting markets. They're not official polling.

Yeah.

So I think like there are these three things. And I know Stephen has done some work on like the power dynamics of election conspiracies as well. I didn't know if you wanted like we can go into in depth on these three things if you would like.

Yeah, I think it could be worth diving into. And I just, you have me thinking about like Kalshi and Polymarket and all this, and it's just how unbelievably frustrating it is to me, this narrative that these are accurate sources of information or because collectively people have put their money on something for some reason that is now considered a good actual odds maker. We're talking about, you know, random political gamblers on the internet. I just, it makes me go crazy, but You did also bring up the, you know, the Dolly Parton sister case where she was, there was speculation around if this machine in Tennessee was switching a vote, but it seemed like this was boiled down largely to touchscreen glitches and errors, which obviously this

is a serious problem. But I do notice it seems like there is this trend of the misattribution of intent around these different errors in our election system and I'm curious about how social media makes that worse, but also, yeah, we can, we can dive into some of the things you mentioned as well too, but.

I'll say like, you know, we were talking about the six ways rigged election rumors mislead. And there are those three other ways that we didn't finish, which was like, there's real evidence with real voting issues. Right. So the problem is, as in the case with Dolly Parton's sister and her touchscreen not working, some folks would exaggerate the impact and say, oh my gosh, this must only be happening to Democrats or oh my gosh, this is only going to happen to Republicans. And then it's going to change election results. When in the end, Dolly Parton's sister cast her ballot the way she wanted to pass. So there's not like a huge impact on election results necessarily.

The second one is ignoring the remedies. Like there are backup paper ballots in those cases. There are things that are going to solve those problems. Oftentimes, by the time you even hear about the rumor, it might have already been solved for. And then third is misattributing the intent, like saying that this is part of some sort of nefarious conspiracy. When it's not like, oh, for instance, ballots being dumped in a dumpster. You know, we see this in Washington state this week. Right. Someone's like this must be an intentional part of election suppression by Republicans putting these ballots in a dumpster somewhere. And that's usually just not the case. Like that intention isn't necessarily there. So

I would say like those are some things to really keep an eye out for. There are always anomalies or challenges or things that break or things that happen during elections. But the ways in which they actually impact votes and outcomes. ignore remedies or misintribute the intent or make it seem like this big conspiracy thing. It's just not necessarily, that's how it misleads the public. And that's where you can kind of get wrapped up also in fretting about things if you don't slow down and really think, okay, what's really happening here.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think to add on to that, there's kind of two distinctions to make here as well.

Right now, we're talking about rumors.

I think one thing to call out is oftentimes these ways that mislead, they co-occur within a single rumor. So, you know, the machines flipping votes, for example, we see rumors like that, and they'll be like, okay, this is suspicious. And they start exaggerating impact, which usually ties into this intent.

So it's saying, oh, this is primarily impacting conservative voters or Democratic voters, and therefore mislead. It must be the goal of the Trump administration or the Democratic Party that's leading to this targeting. So these ways are ways that we have articulated how we see how rumors mislead, but they often are misleading in multiple ways at the same time.

They resonate with these larger narratives. So there's no single rumor that just exists in a vacuum. When we see these rumors spreading, they're resonating with political rhetoric. And so to have the machine slipping vote in a larger political conversation about election integrity, about claims, like all across the political spectrum, we're seeing claims of fraud or people being afraid that different parts of the election administration are being manipulated.

And so these rumors, then they exist as these plausible explanations to explain things that we don't fully understand. And I think maybe one of the things to emphasize and separate then is the rumoring from election administration itself, where oftentimes just because someone's know what that remedy is, that doesn't mean there isn't a remedy. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a security or a safeguard in place to make sure that votes are counted, to make sure that that malfunctioning screen doesn't disenfranchise someone, doesn't prevent them being able to vote. And as Danielle said, in those cases, people were still able to vote. It's just it didn't work as perfectly as we would want it to work.

And I think it's important to remember that. Elections are really complicated. When we look at elections in the United States, they are not centrally run. Every state has districts that are running it based off of their local laws and regulations.

And so.

This is a very complicated process that involves both electronic systems, human organizations, and a lot of things that have gone through a lot of vetting to get into place. And election administrators, it's their full-time job to make sure that those safeguards are in place. And even with that, things do go wrong. It's just part of every system is imperfect.

Things will naturally go wrong. And the goal is to make sure that there are safeguards in place, backups for remedies when things don't work out the way we want them to. I imagine this has, like you mentioned, power dynamics. This interfaces a lot with that as well. I am still sort of stuck on this idea of Trump paying.

What did you say?

He offered to pay people a million dollars to report fraud?

Yeah.

Could you elaborate on that? What is that exactly? Yeah.

Yeah. like right before we stepped into this interview, Trump posted on Truth Social that there would be a million dollar reward for anyone who reported fraud in this or previous elections. And he instructed folks to go to fraud.gov to do so. Now fraud.gov has existed for a while now. It's like a way to report like welfare fraud, Medicare fraud, contracting fraud, like all sorts of types of fraud. And it's sort of like part of this participatory effort to like get the public involved in engaging in essentially like a hunt for fraud. But what's, what's ironic is we could not, so we can, this is serious, but Tina Peters, who was a quote unquote election integrity activist in Colorado and previous election who had like intentionally committed essentially committed

voter fraud and was indicted and charged and imprisoned as with felony offense for election fraud, essentially. Oh, my God. And then was had her sentence commuted by the Democratic governor of Colorado recently. So she was let out of prison. Like, would someone who reported that get a million dollar reward?

Yeah.

So I think it's important to note that there's a lot of showmanship here. There's the bark and then there's the bite of the powers that be. The bark is saying, oh my gosh, there's so much election fraud. Look at, you know, we saw last week in California, look at the 20,000 person list of alleged non-citizen voters. Oh my gosh, look, every day we have a new DOJ, DHS and White House press release saying that we have arrested or charged more alleged non-citizen voters. But in fact, our analysis has shown that Sometimes they're repeating the same names that they were repeated the day before. But it creates this what's called immediate theory, like a pseudo event, like you're drawing all this attention to this perceived problem when it's a

drop in the bucket compared to actual impact on elections or these are allegations. They're not proven. There's something about that's different this time when the president and. his administration are using their power and their legitimacy as heads of entire departments of justice to make these allegations that seem a lot bigger than they in fact are, or just misleading entirely. And that is incredibly challenging and problematic. And that's why it creates that anxiety amongst left and liberal folks that president might interfere or intervene because with bounties essentially being posted for election fraud, who isn't to be afraid of that? But I think the important thing to remember is the numbers game here. Like at the end

of the day, this is a massive country with election administration. carried out on a hyper-local level. And as we've noted, like you can make these allegations that you're going to essentially sue Alaska to stop certifying its election because there are two guys with a similar sounding name on the ballot and maybe people will be confused. Like we saw that last week, right? That's like a kind of spurious lawsuit right there that doesn't seem to have much precedent.

But the fact that there's this constant like bark, bark, bark, bark, like more problem, more problem, more problem when... It's like kind of maybe the same problems that keep being repeated. It makes your eardrums bleed. So like the bark is just sort of hurting, even if it's not a direct bite, like direct federal interference by sending, say, ice to the polls.

So these are like different things. And we have to remember to like turn the volume down and focus on what we can do. And that's like what we say in our suggestions to election officials, to journalists, to creators, to always go back to what you can do to protect your vote, to vote early, to make sure to track your ballot. Each state has different tracking mechanisms to make sure that your ballot got counted, to drop it off in secure locations, right? Like all of these different things that you can do to make sure that your ballot is safe and counted instead of getting caught up in these larger narratives, which we don't want to deny are very frustrating and create this sense of insecurity and

mistrust in our elections. But to just remember the numbers game here. And a number of people who are going to cast their ballots versus the small number that are being accused of this fraud is very, very different. Yeah.

To add on a little bit of detail to what Daniel has already mentioned here, particularly around this, like motivating people to look for evidence in the power dynamics here. We have seen that kind of call to activate these audiences to go out and look for evidence. That is not new. What's new right now is the the power that the folks who are making those calls have. There's a group called the Election Integrity Network, which is run by an election denier named Cleta Mitchell, who has had this like national kind of activist organization that has been doing very similar work. So they've been recruiting volunteers to look for evidence of perceived fraud. They amplify that evidence.

And oftentimes it's the type of thing that we see in our work where they look at an ambiguous picture and it shows something completely different from what they think it shows. When you have enough people who are engaging in this, it can create the illusion that something real is occurring. So a lot of this is like retroactively trying to find evidence that supports the claims that have been made that are genuinely unfounded. So for example, when we look at claims of non-citizen voters, which is one of the largest narratives that we see in the work that we do, Brennan Center did a study to try to look at the number of non-citizen voters that actually vote in elections. And there's like point zero zero zero

zero one percent of voters are non-citizen. So it's like, yeah, OK, occasionally there's a case that I think Danielle mentioned that the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have had these press releases where they're arresting in a very public way.

Yeah.

These these folks who are there alleging and have not proven, but they're alleging that they have voted illegally in elections. So they're using that to create the illusion that something exists when the reality is the evidence is just really sparse. It's just not the issue that they're saying it is.

And so it comes down to this numbers game. But there's a difference when we look at social media, when we look at media dynamics in general, very often people aren't looking at the statistics directly. They're taking people's word for it that this is an issue and the stories, they can be very salient and they spread. And those are what drive rumors are these like very sensational stories, things that that feel that maybe make us feel outraged or outraged. or sad, or angry, or some sort of emotional response to it. We wrote a piece in 2024 where we outlined some of what we call the evidence generation infrastructure. And this was under something that we call the three Cs of election contestation. So the first one

was convince, which is convincing people that election fraud was happening. The second one is collect, where they go out and collect evidence of this perceived fraud, which is kind of what we're talking about now. And the second part is contest. So funneling that evidence into lawsuits, into these political narratives that then mobilize audiences and find ways to both contest elections legally and rhetorically on the political stage. And so we see this intersection of governance, of now law enforcement, of court filings, as well as the political sphere, where we see that what has... historically remained constrained to the political sphere of contesting elections rhetorically, but now it's seeping

into many of these other spaces as well. But it all creates the illusion that something exists that doesn't actually exist.

That's the end of what I've included from the interview, and I hope it was helpful for some of you. I find personally as a journalist who mingles with the content creation and social media spaces, it's Very frustrating to me how fast these rumors can propagate on social media, and I feel it's best if we can avoid becoming unwitting agents of misinformation. I'm stealing some language from the CIP team, but some questions they said that are worth asking are, why am I hearing this? What are the incentives behind it? Does this contribute to someone's clicks, clout, or cash? Again, rumors can be true, but I guess it would be nice if we didn't all accidentally drive each other fucking crazy in the next few weeks, because

I'm certain there will be people trying to do so intentionally. We have to assess the validity of rigged election claims and slow things down, especially amid a discourse that feels as if it's growing more and more conspiratorial. It's bound to be an exhausting process, and I wish you all luck.

Thanks for listening.

Election Rumors and Conspiracism

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