ATLANTA– Voting machines reverse votes. More voters have registered than people who qualify. Large numbers non-citizens vote.
With less than two weeks before Election Daya revival of conspiracy theories and disinformation over voting forces state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors And explain how elections work At the same time, they are overseeing early voting and preparing for November 5.
“The truth is boring, facts are boring and outrage is really interesting,” said Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing a game with the truth. But what we’re trying to do is get as much information out there as possible.”
This year’s election will be the first presidential election since former President Donald Trump took office spread lies about the widespread voter fraud that will cost him his re-election in 2020 false claimswhich he keeps repeatinghave undermined public confidence in elections and in the people who oversee them broad group of Republican voters . Research has found no widespread fraud or manipulation thereof voting machines four years ago, and each of the battleground states where Trump doubtful has his loss confirmed Democrat J o Biden’s victory.
In the past week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged that a voting machine altered a voter’s ballot in her Georgia district during early voting, and Elon Muskthe billionaire owner of the social media platform X, has promoted several conspiracy theories about voting machines and voter fraud both online and online. rally for Trump in Pennsylvania.
The floodgates are “very much” open, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who now heads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with state and local election officials.
“This makes life much more difficult for election officials,” he said.
Eric Olsen, who oversees elections in Prince William County, Virginia, said combating misinformation has become an important and challenging part of the job.
“It’s often very difficult from our position because social media feels like there’s a giant wave coming at you and we’re in a little canoe with a paddle,” he said. “But we have to do that work.”
Trump has done this repeatedly on the campaign trail tried to sow doubt about the upcoming election – something he did prior to his two previous bids for the White House. Even after winning in 2016, he claimed he lost the popular vote due to a flood of illegal votes and set up a presidential advisory committee to investigate. The committee was dissolved without finding any widespread fraud.
This year, Trump claims Democrats will cheat again and uses “Too Big to Rig” as a rallying cry to encourage his supporters to vote. Election experts see it as a basis for challenging the election again if he loses.
Spreading false accusations about elections has other consequences. It already is led to a wave of intimidation, threats And sales of election workers and of the violent attack at the US Capitol January 6, 2021.
The conspiracy theories that have emerged in recent weeks are not new. There have long been claims of “vote flipping,” with the most recent ones popping up in Georgia and Tennessee.
A claim in Georgia’s Whitfield County was highlighted by Greene on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show. Jones has a history of spreading falsehoods and was ordered to do so pay $1.5 billion for his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax.
County election officials issued a statement noting that the case involved one voter out of 6,000 ballots cast since early voting began. The vote was spoiled and the elector cast out a replacement who was counted. Officials said there was no problem with the voting machine.
Gabriel Sterling, Chief Operating Officer for Georgia’s Secretary of State, said every report they have seen so far of someone saying their printed ballot did not reflect their selections on the touchscreen voting machine was the result of voter error.
“There is no evidence whatsoever that a machine reverses an individual’s vote,” he said. “Are there any elderly people whose hands are shaking and who probably kind of pressed the wrong button and didn’t check their ballot properly before printing it? That’s the most important situation we’ve seen. There is literally zero – and I say this to certain members of Congress in this state – zero evidence that machines are flipping votes. That claim was a lie in 2020 and it is a lie now.”
In Shelby County, Tennessee, election officials said human error was to blame for reports of voting changes. Voters used their fingers instead of a stylus to mark their selections on voting machines, officials said.
In Washington state, Republican Jerrod Sessler, who is running for the state’s fourth congressional district seat, shared a video on social media this week that purported to show how easily fraudulent ballots can be created. But the video did not make clear that voter information on each ballot is checked against the state’s voter rolls.
“A ballot returned using false voter registration information will not be counted and is illegal in Washington state,” Charlie Boisner, a spokesperson for the State Department, said in an email.
Musk recently called on Dominion Voting Systems as part of his comments on a demonstration in Pennsylvania, which seemed to suggest the equipment was not reliable. Dominion has been to the center of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 elections and their resolution defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year for $787 million over false claims repeatedly aired on the network. The judge in the case said yes “CRYSTAL CLEAR” that none of the accusations made by Trump allies on the network were true.
In a statement, Dominion said it was “closely monitoring the claims surrounding the November 2024 election” and was “fully prepared to defend our company. & our customers against lies and those who spread them.”
A request for comment from Musk was not immediately returned.
Musk, who has supported Trump, has done so too repeatedly spread disinformation about voter fraud to his 200 million followers on the X platform, where false information spreads largely uncontrolled.
He has often sparred online with Michigan’s secretary of state Jocelyn Benson. Recently the two got into a fight Musk’s claim that in Michigan, a presidential battleground, there were more registered voters than eligible people. Benson said Musk includes inactive voters in his count who are about to be purged. a federal judge on Tuesday filed a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee alleging problems with the state’s voter rolls.
During an interview last month, Benson said she was disheartened to see someone in Musk’s position repeating false information.
“If he was sincerely committed, as he says, to making sure people have access to information, then I would hope he would amplify the truthful information – the factual, accurate information – about the security of our elections, rather than just but amplifying conspiracy theories and in a way that turns the ire of many of his followers on us as individual election administrators,” Benson said. “It’s something we didn’t have to deal with in 2020 and it creates a new battlefront and a new challenge for us.”
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Fernando reported from Chicago. Associated Press writers Kate Brumback in Atlanta and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.
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