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.
The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) seeks to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse while shortening the cycle between research and implementation. We have aligned world-class researchers, thought leaders, and practitioners to translate research about misinformation and disinformation into policy, technology design, education, public engagement, and community impact. Our nonpartisan Center brings together diverse voices from across industry, government, nonprofits, other academic institutions, as well as those from communities and populations typically underrepresented in research and practice.
Following our pathbreaking work in 2020 and 2022 with the Election Integrity Partnership — a nonpartisan research consortium with Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab — CIP researchers continue to conduct “rapid research” identifying and analyzing rumors about U.S. election administration to support both information and election integrity in 2024. Specifically, we focus on understanding, communicating about, and helping to mitigate the spread of false, misleading, and unsubstantiated claims about election processes and results. Our work directly supports journalists, elections officials, and non-profit organizations working in underserved communities in quickly resolving rumors and helping people get accurate information about election processes.
Approach
Our 2024 election effort adapts innovative research methods — integrating qualitative, quantitative, visual, and generative AI approaches — for analyzing the spread of information across social media and other online platforms to the challenge of rapidly discovering, analyzing, and reporting on election-related rumors and disinformation campaigns.
We operationalize our work around the term “rumors” for three reasons:
- Rumors are often false, but they can also turn out to be true, or somewhere in between. Using the term allows us to begin working on and communicating about a story, claim, or set of claims while there is still uncertainty.
- Even when false, rumors often contain important signals for communicators such as election officials and journalists. For example, they can reveal genuine confusions about election processes or real fears among a population about being disenfranchised. Identifying and helping to resolve rumors can improve trust in election processes.
- There is a long history of research on rumoring that our researchers can draw upon as we conceptualize and communicate about our work. For example, this literature theorizes that uncertainty, ambiguity, and anxiety drive the rumor mill.
Rumors can be detrimental to democratic processes in multiple ways.
- False information about when and where to vote or about violence at polling locations can lead to disenfranchisement, impeding voters from successfully casting their votes.
- False rumors about election integrity can diminish willingness to participate and erode trust in election results, undermining the foundations of democracy. In 2024, we’re also likely to see false rumors that undermine trust in U.S. courts (which adjudicate election disputes and challenges).
- False rumors about election integrity can also motivate changes to election processes that reduce election integrity, resulting in an “unvirtuous cycle.” For example, false conspiracy theories about ERIC, a system that helps states communicate and keep their voter rolls updated, are motivating some states to exit the system, which could create vulnerabilities for exploitation. Similarly, false claims about vote-counting processes are leading some counties to institute hand-counting procedures, which slow down the reporting of results, increase uncertainty, and likely drive more rumoring.
- Pervasive rumors about election fraud provide opportunities for foreign information operations to sow further doubt in democratic processes. They also create a “boy who cried wolf” situation that may make it difficult to detect and address real concerns with election integrity.
Rumors can also be signals for disinformation campaigns. Disinformation campaigns purposefully seed, cultivate, and amplify rumors for strategic gain. With the help of online platforms, disinformation campaigns are increasingly “participatory” — taking shape as collaborations between witting agents (both foreign and domestic) and unwitting crowds. Unwinding these efforts and identifying intentional actors is vital for mitigating their impact.
Anticipated Outputs
The CIP’s work in 2024 continues along the same trajectory as our work with the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020 and 2022. We help address informational threats to election integrity through “rapid research” of election-related rumors, education, development and dissemination of conceptual tools, and tailored support for local journalists.
Our core research focuses on rapidly discovering, resolving, analyzing the spread of, and broadly communicating about rumors pertaining to election processes and results. The project integrates state-of-the-art data collection and analysis techniques with journalistic communication to help identify and meet informational needs around election administration. Our intended audiences include journalists, election officials, and the broader public. Examples of recent research are available on our website.
Our core “rapid research” activities will focus on producing outputs around a 2-2-2 timeline:
- 2 hours: Short blog and social media posts calling attention to emerging rumors, explaining what is currently known and what remains uncertain, linking to relevant resources such as fact checks from other organizations and websites from local election officials, and providing cursory analysis of where rumors are spreading.
- 2 days: Medium-length articles (for example) unpacking a specific rumor’s content (including if and how it was misleading) and analyzing its spread across platforms.
- 2 weeks: Longer articles (for example, here and here) more deeply analyzing specific rumors and/or investigating patterns of rumor spread across platforms.
We help educate journalists, election officials, and the broader public about informational threats to election integrity. Leveraging insights from our ongoing research, we generate public-facing articles and presentations for stakeholders (e.g., election officials and journalists) to help educate around patterns in the tactics, tropes, and social media dynamics that fuel election-related rumors. We also integrate recommendations for these different audiences into our rapid research outputs.
We collaborate with journalists to help them investigate and report on online rumors, providing education (about the intersections of online systems and election rumors) as well as methodological support for conducting cross-platform social media analysis. We have a team dedicated to scaffolding and studying these collaborations and we are especially focused on working with and supporting local journalists in this cycle.
We generate conceptual tools to help other researchers, journalists, and election officials anticipate, understand, and respond to election-related rumors. These efforts draw upon both our traditional and rapid research. Examples include a “what to expect on election day” checklist (published in 2020) and a “rumor threat framework” for assessing the potential virality of election-related rumors (published in 2022). We are currently working on a 2×2 matrix for understanding how conspiracy theories about election fraud work along two dimensions: exaggerating the impact of small voting issues and falsely assigning intent to unintentional errors. We plan to produce a guidebook for election officials featuring these tools and other insights from our rapid research, publishing it as separate chapters as we progress.
We work within a collaborative network of researchers and nonprofit organizations. Ensuring information and election integrity is going to be a team effort. We position our work within a broad, informal network of academic researchers, nonprofit organizations, and others who are working with a shared mission. We are directly collaborating with other academic institutions (e.g., at Stanford University and the Brennan Center for Justice) and with non-profit organizations (such as Viet Fact Check) that support underserved communities with unique resources and vulnerabilities. We plan to put more collaborations in place as we progress towards Election Day in November and also to informally make our resources available to others doing work aligned with our mission.
Photo at top: A polling location at a school in Des Moines, Iowa by Phil Roeder / Flickr via CC BY 2.0 DEED