Approximately 40 researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP), working with the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) as part of the nonpartisan Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), are identifying, monitoring and analyzing rumors, conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting taking shape around the 2022 midterm U.S. elections.
“We’ve anticipated legitimate mistakes and issues with election infrastructure being reframed as fraud,” Kate Starbird, CIP faculty director and an associate professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, told CNN in an interview on Tuesday.
Last week, the ElP published a blog analysis, written by CIP research scientist Mike Caulfield with contributions from CIP and SIO researchers, that outlines the rumors, conspiracy theories, and mis- and disinformation narratives that are anticipated to take shape around Election Day and in the days to follow.
Among the key takeaways:
- Many rumors about Election Day will surface in the weeks after the election, particularly in cases where uncertainty around election results has been extended by a close result, recount, litigation, or a candidate’s refusal to concede.
- As in 2020, rumors, conspiracy theories, and misleading narratives about the 2022 U.S. midterm election are following a familiar progression: Interested parties gathering “evidence,” delegitimizing results, and calling for action.
- One big difference this time around: Election fraud narratives are now deeply familiar to audiences that had only a passing familiarity with them two years ago.
“As people come to observe, we expect some conflict around that because I think there’s inevitably going to be some misunderstandings around what those observers are able to do and what they aren’t,” Caulfield told The Washington Post in an article published Tuesday.
The EIP analysis was featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, Cyberscoop, Route Fifty and GeekWire.
The EIP’s rapid-response research around an incident in Maricopa County, Arizona, tracked and analyzed by the CIP’s team, was featured in NBC News, National Public Radio, USA Today, Reuters, The New York Times and Gizmodo, among other news outlets, on Tuesday.
“The Maricopa County story was immediately framed as, ‘This is all a trick to send your ballot downtown to the counting center where they will do nefarious things to your ballot,’ which is hilarious since the counting center is one of the most surveilled places in any given county,” Caulfield told NBC News in a follow-up interview. “It’s literally a place with bipartisan oversight and video surveillance.”
A New York Times data visualization, based on an EIP analysis of Twitter data related to Tuesday’s Maricopa County incident, illustrated how “several prominent right-wing personalities and Republican politicians helped catapult the claims to the mainstream on Tuesday morning.”
In an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Morgan Wack, a UW Political Science doctoral student working with the CIP’s EIP research team, noted that false and misleading claims about the 2022 midterm elections are likely to stick around. “We will almost certainly see this again in 2024,” Wack said.
Other CIP contributions to recent Election Integrity Partnership research include, “Beyond Twitter: The Election 2022 social media ecosystem,” and “Misinformed monitors: How conspiracy theories surrounding ‘ballot mules’ led to accusations of voter intimidation.”
In related news, KUOW Public Radio in Seattle interviewed UW Information School doctoral student Sarah Nguyễn, a researcher at the CIP, about ongoing work to better understand how misinformation is targeting Vietnamese communities in the Seattle area.
For more information about the work of the Election Integrity Partnership, visit eipartnership.net and follow updates via Twitter at @EI_Partnership.
Photo above: A “Vote Here” sign outside a precinct location in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan. Photo by Corey Seeman / Flickr via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
