Election Rumor Rundown for October 13: Emerging rumors around voting machines and ‘ballot dumping’

DHS reports misconstrue vulnerabilities as having been exploited, “Ballot Dumping” in Valley Center misleadingly suggest mass voter fraud, and prediction markets already advertising election bettin…

Recent Utah, Texas incidents fuel rumors and political narratives undermining trust in election integrity

A CIP Election Rumor Rundown

Out of context: How a video of Maricopa County election workers fueled a false election fraud narrative

On X, the “rigged election” crowd is pushing rumors around a video clip of election workers in Arizona, working late at night, allegedly doing something nefarious.

"Rigged Election" Bingo

Spot the tropes before they spread. Recognize the common story elements behind election rumors — can you get BINGO?

Anticipating Election Misinformation in the 2026 Midterms

Election misinformation often follows the same pattern every cycle. Here are some of the false and misleading claims that voters are likely to see.

Deep Storytelling: Collective Sensemaking and Layers of Meaning in U.S. Elections

Misinformation and disinformation about elections remain pressing concerns for researchers, policymakers, and the public. Critics, however, argue that fears surrounding these issues are exaggerated due to a lack of evidence of impact. This debate highlights the challenges inherent in assessing the impacts of misinformation, as the drivers of false and misleading content often exist in the context of a specific claim. To address this issue, we examined false and misleading information surrounding the 2020 and 2022 U.S. national elections, focusing on the contextual features of online conversations that fueled various rumors. We developed two qualitative codebooks, creating the second after realizing that the first, which labeled individual tweets, failed to capture broader rumoring dynamics. By integrating multi-layered qualitative coding with thematic analysis and quantitative visualizations, we show how influencers, political elites, and audiences collaboratively told deep stories from 2020 through 2022. As these stories were told, audiences interpreted events in 2022 through the lens of the 2020 story, guided by influencers' cues, leading to an evolution in storytelling style between the two election cycles. This ongoing performance was tailored to align with the incentive structures, affordances, and attention economy of social media. We combine deep stories with theories of collective sensemaking and rumoring, creating a framework to better assess the contextual features surrounding false and misleading information.

The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far (Published 2018)

For two years, Americans have tried to absorb the details of the 2016 attack: spies, leaked emails, social media fraud — and President Trump’s claims that it’s all a hoax. The Times explores what we know and what it means.

LLMs Are Still Making Election Deepfakes Just Days Before the US Midterms

The Brennan Center tested AI chatbots to see if they would generate images with false election claims. The results were unsettling, writes Abdiaziz Ahmed.

Security and disinformation in the U.S. 2016 election

We have been conducting a thorough investigation related to the U.S. election across our products. Today, we are sharing results from that investigation.

Never Mind The Deepfakes, Chatbots Have To Deal With Election Lies Being Free, While Truth Is Paywalled

It seems that every election cycle over the last decade has had concerns being raised about the state of “political deepfakes” and their ability to impact the election. So far, these ha…

Verifying information about elections

We can help you check the facts behind election information you receive.

Election Deniers Aren’t Contesting Their Massive Losses

For months, election deniers claimed without evidence that the vote would be rigged. Now they appear to be accepting crushing defeats.

Election polling errors across time and space

Are election polling misses becoming more prevalent? Are they more likely in some contexts than others? Here we undertake an over-time and cross-national assessment of prediction errors in pre-election polls. Our analysis draws on more than 30,000 national polls from 351 general elections in 45 countries between 1942 and 2017. We proceed in the following way. First, building on previous studies, we show how errors in national polls evolve in a structured way over the election timeline. Second, we examine errors in polls in the final week of the election campaign to assess performance across election years. Third, we undertake a pooled analysis of polling errors—controlling for a number of institutional and party features—that enables us to test whether poll errors have increased or decreased over time. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the recent performance of polls has not been outside the ordinary. However, the performance of polls does vary across political contexts and in understandable ways.

How Trump’s obsession with ‘rigged’ voting machines spread across US government

The effort to prove the 2020 election "stolen" failed. Diehards remain undeterred.

Election Disinformation in Different Languages is a Big Problem in the U.S.

And it’s driving a wedge between voters in non-English communities Mis- and disinformation about elections predate the endless scroll of modern social media services. [1] Yet easy access to online information channels and amplification tools enable false narratives to spread at a massive scale. When false narratives are combined with data voids and unique cultural […]