The election misinformation machine is already ramping up in critical battleground states as early voting gets underway, and election officials are hustling to combat falsehoods in real time.
Conservatives have been sharing uncorroborated instances of machines flipping votes, claims of widespread fraud in mail ballots and suggestions that election officials are subverting the process if it takes multiple days to count ballots. The claims are ricocheting around social media as voters hit the polls. They mirror claims that former President Donald Trump and his allies spread around the 2020 election as they tried to head off Trump’s loss to now-President Joe Biden.
State and local election officials, however, are also preparing for a deluge of false and misleading claims, and are actively trying to address issues before they go far.
“Our humble ask is that before people swallow whole what they see in their social media feed, they at least verify it against a trusted source,” Minnesota Secretary of State and president of the National Association of Secretaries of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told reporters this week.
Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Alliance for Securing Democracy who’s focused on election-related disinformation, said that some of the push is needed because social media companies have stepped back from challenging false claims.
“It’s reassuring how much better election officials have gotten around communication in advance of the election,” Schafer said. “There definitely wasn’t the same level of interaction four years ago … in trying to communicate any changes in how voting will work this time, and, to the extent possible, short-circuit some of the false election narratives we know will be coming.”
Here are four examples from this month as early voting continues in earnest:
Machines switching votes?
“We have received a report that twice, persons voting on a machine had the machine alter their vote from Trump to Harris,” the Washoe County Republican Party in Nevada claimed in an email blast that was flagged on social media by local political reporter Jon Ralston.
It was reminiscent of the many debunked voting machine claims from 2020. And while those conspiracy theories continue to swirl online, a spokesperson for Washoe County told CNN there have been no specific complaints about machines flipping votes since early voting began.
Claims of voter fraud also circulated in Texas this week as early voting began in the state. In one instance, shared by some right-wing personalities on social media, a man claimed that his vote had been switched on the voting machine from one candidate to another, telling people to “check your paper ballots.” Trump allies who shared the video claimed that Texas’ Tarrant County used a voting system that had vulnerabilities and led to the alleged switch.
The county’s Elections Administration Department issued a statement Tuesday pushing back on these claims, saying that in one reported instance, a voter reviewed their printed ballot and “found that it did not correctly reflect his choice for President.”
Another ballot was provided and the issue was resolved, the department said, adding that they had “no reason to believe votes are being switched by the voting system.”
Counting votes in Georgia
In Georgia, several right-wing accounts seized on a CBS interview with GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over the weekend, in which he said the state should be able to report 70% to 75% of the vote total by 8 p.m. on Election Day. He noted the state would still need to tally overseas and military ballots, which can be received until the Friday after Election Day and could help determine the winner in a razor-thin race.
But Raffensperger’s critics twisted his comments to make it seem as if he was suggesting 25% of the remaining vote would come from overseas or military ballots and that there was no chance the state would be able to report results for three days – claims Raffensperger did not make.
“I know you’re up to something & it is going to all come to light,” Kylie Jane Kremer, a Trump supporter who helped to organize the January 6, 2021, rally on the Ellipse that precluded the attack on the US Capitol, said on X. “You don’t just belong in jail, you belong under the jail, for subverting Georgian’s right to secure, free & fair elections.”
Kremer told CNN, “Raffensperger is putting out confusing information to the masses on voting,” but said she believes all overseas and military ballots should be counted.
Raffensperger responded to some of the criticism on X, reiterating that most of the early vote would be tallied by 8 p.m. and Election Day votes would be reported later that evening.
But the inaccurate extrapolations had already taken off and, much to the disappointment of officials in Georgia, Utah Sen. Mike Lee was among those criticizing Raffensperger.
Lee, a Republican, posted “Just…no” on X, as he shared a post inaccurately claiming that Raffensperger said the results wouldn’t be ready for three days.
Raffensperger’s appearance on CBS came as he too was debunking a claim that machines were flipping votes.
“We’re going to respond quickly to these sorts of things in 2024 because it’s not supported by the facts,” Raffensperger said. “The equipment’s working.”
Mail ballots in Arizona
In Arizona, officials were also hitting back at the notion that taking multiple days to count the ballots somehow equates to election fraud.
“Any Secretary of State in any state who gets on TV today and says it’ll take days to count the votes is a cheater, a traitor, and should be arrested,” a prominent right-wing account called Catturd posted on X.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, shot back: “That’s one possibility. A different possibility is that different states have different state laws.”
In Arizona, for instance, experts expect hundreds of thousands of voters to return their mail ballots on Election Day, which takes time to process and count. Other states don’t have the same kind of deluge of Election Day mail ballots.
Unattended ballots in Minnesota
In another instance that left officials scrambling, officials in Minneapolis over the weekend tried to mitigate the fallout of a picture circulating on social media showing boxes of unattended ballots in a parking lot.
Local GOP leaders and pro-Trump accounts raised suspicions on Friday about the incident, spreading the photo and questioning the legitimacy of mail-in voting, which nonpartisan experts say is a secure process that isn’t plagued by widespread fraud.
Within hours, Hennepin County officials issued a statement acknowledging the “unacceptable” security lapse – and posted 18 minutes of surveillance footage to YouTube, showing that nobody touched the unguarded ballots.
“Mis- and disinformation is one of the biggest challenges facing elections officials right now, and getting out ahead of rumors as quickly as we can is our only hope of combatting them,” Hennepin County elections director Ginny Gelms told CNN.
CNN’s Zachary Cohen, Tierney Sneed and Bob Ortega contributed to this report.