2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG
This is part of an ongoing series of rapid research blog posts and rapid research analysis about the 2024 U.S. elections from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. It is crossposted on the CIP’s election rumor research Substack newsletter.
- Over the weekend, ballot errors were reported in Palm Beach County, Florida, and in Montana. Both mistakes were quickly remedied.
- Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s name was misspelled in Palm Beach County.
- In Montana, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was left off on the Electronic Absentee System ballot.
- There are thousands of voting jurisdictions around the United States, and mistakes sometimes happen. These ballot printing errors are likely unintentional and have remedies. They won’t impact results.
What are the rumors?
On September 22, The New York Times reported a typographical error on the electronic ballots emailed to military and overseas voters by Palm Beach County, Florida, elections officials. The error, in which the name of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was misspelled as “Tom Walz,” was present in 257 electronic ballots. The office in charge of these ballots was notified within 18 hours of the email messages going out, and the affected voters were emailed an updated ballot. The county’s election supervisor has clarified that every vote will count as the voter intended and that this event will not impact vote tabulation. Despite prompt clarification from the Palm Beach County election supervisor, some social media users have shared the story of the misspelled electronic ballots as an example of Republican scheming.
On September 20, a newspaper in Kalispell, Montana, The Daily Inter Lake, reported that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was omitted from the ballots on the state’s Electronic Absentee System, typically used for absentee and international voters. The Montana Secretary of State, a Republican, briefly took the system offline to correct the issue by that Friday. These intentionality claims are not substantiated. Regardless, some accounts suggested that the Secretary of State should be arrested, ascribing intentionality to the error. These intentionality claims are not substantiated.
Concurrently, internet users across social media began to conflate this Montana omission and other balloting errors with recent attempts by Republican officials to change election rules (some successful, some not) as part of a larger plan by Republicans to interfere with the election. The ballot errors appear to be unrelated to the rule changes.
An example of a post conflating that ballot errors and attempts to change processes are all indicators of attempts to steal the election.
What are the impacts?
The United States has thousands of different voting jurisdictions that are locally adjudicated, each with its unique ballots. Unfortunately, mistakes sometimes happen, but they are rarely intentional, almost always have remedies, and are unlikely to affect outcomes. Perhaps not surprising considering persistent distrust in election integrity, real errors within election administration — such as misprinted ballots or malfunctioning machines — often become the seeds for false rumors that exaggerate impact, overlook remedies, and falsely attribute intent to these events. (These are three of the five most common “moves” of misleading election rumors.)
In the 2024 cases featured here (in Florida and Montana), election officials were able to catch these ballot issues quickly and provide remedies. It is very unlikely that these early mistakes will impact results. However, speculation about these issues being intentional and possibly affecting outcomes may contribute to distrust in election processes and results.
PHOTO AT TOP: The interior of the Montana State Capitol in Helena by drburtoni / Flickr via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.