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Disinformation and misinformation about the Nov. 5 election have reached a fever pitch, and Maricopa County is right at the center of it.
Election officials and experts, as well as people devoted to fighting election falsehoods, are worried that their ubiquity this election cycle will lead to voter suppression and will contribute to unfounded demands for the results to be overturned.
“I think Arizona and specifically Maricopa County is potentially ground zero of misinformation about the election,” Zarine Kharazian, a researcher for the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, told the Arizona Mirror on Thursday.
CIP brings together researchers to investigate disinformation and misinformation and to educate the public about it.
Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, told the Mirror that the combination of a highly polarized electorate and a lack of accountability on social media have created a “petri dish of falsehoods” that spread from social media sites like X, formerly Twitter, to be amplified on podcasts and YouTube.
MediaWise is a nonprofit that focuses on spreading media literacy so that people can identify misinformation on their own.
“Now you can just post a clip of anyone doing anything and slap a message on it saying you’ve witnessed election fraud,” Mahadevan said.
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That already happened in Maricopa County when right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe shared a secret recording late last month of a trainer telling election workers not to confront voters if they witness suspected ballot harvesting.
O’Keefe, who is known for publishing misleading undercover videos, posted the recording on X, claiming that the video brought up “serious questions about the integrity of the voting process.”
In reality, the video showed the trainer providing an accurate description of the state’s election laws. Even the head of the Arizona Republican Party, Gina Swoboda, who has a reputation of spreading misinformation herself, said the election worker did nothing wrong.
Bolstered by Elon
Several of the people devoted to fighting disinformation who spoke to the Mirror shared their concern about a new community on X, created specifically for users to share “potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.”
Elon Musk, the owner of X and a die-hard Donald Trump supporter who is spending millions of his own dollars to boost the campaign of the first convicted felon presidential candidate, has not only allowed conspiracy theories to flow freely on the site — with fact checking only from other X users — but actively shares and promotes false claims.
The site’s “Election Integrity Community,” which had more than 55,000 members as of Oct. 31, has become a breeding ground for misinformation. In it users are sharing photos of voters and election workers that they claim are breaking the law or committing fraud, based purely on speculation.
Arizona’s legacy of misinformation
The Grand Canyon State has been a hotbed for false claims of election fraud, dating back to 2018, the midterms during Trump’s first term as president. That year, the Arizona Republican Party and Trump fueled a wave of baseless fraud allegations after Martha McSally lost the U.S. Senate race to then-Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.
“Democrats are stealing this election,” AZGOP attorney Kory Langhofer declared, before he and the party’s chairman at the time, Jonathan Lines, repeatedly refused to answer any questions or provide any evidence backing up the outrageous claim.
The lies about election fraud intensified in 2020 after Trump lost to President Joe Biden, thanks in part to a Democrat winning Arizona’s electoral votes for the first time since 1996. That prompted GOP state senators to launch a botched partisan audit of the results in Maricopa County, which did not find any evidence of fraud.
But that did little to stop the invented claims of election fraud. Several of the Republicans running for statewide office in Arizona in 2022 continued spreading false claims of fraud and rigged elections about Trump’s 2020 loss, and then their own losses after Democratic candidates defeated them.
All of them failed in their lawsuits aimed at overturning the results of the election, including the state’s most prominent election denier, Kari Lake, the Republican running for U.S. Senate, who has still not conceded the gubernatorial race that happened nearly two years ago. Lake still has a lingering appeal in the case to the Arizona Supreme Court.
Several Republican members of the Arizona Legislature, including those on the committees that vet proposed election law changes, are purveyors of unproven election myths, and have advocated sweeping election law changes based on conspiracy theories.
What’s the word in 2024?
The experts who spoke with the Mirror agreed that some of the most popular election lies this year have been recycled from 2020 and 2022 for a good reason: because they worked.
False narratives that noncitizens are voting in large numbers — a claim Trump made after his 2016 victory, despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes — have spread across the country. In Arizona, those rumors have been fueled by a computer glitch that was discovered by the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office just weeks before the election.
The glitch in the state’s Motor Vehicle Division computer system resulted in approximately 218,000 voters being registered without providing proof of citizenship. All of the impacted voters were issued an Arizona driver’s license prior to 1996, and were never asked to provide documented proof of their citizenship after the people of Arizona voted to require it in 2004.
Even though it’s unlikely that a meaningful number of them are not U.S. citizens, that hasn’t stopped the glitch from fueling rumors on X.
Tammy Patrick, a former employee of longtime Republican Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell for 11 years, and the current CEO for programs at Election Center, said during a virtual media briefing on Oct. 31 that she’s hearing reports this year of people casting aspersions at decades-old election laws and practices.
People have called into question long-used election administration practices and policies and standard operating procedures for election officials, claiming that they are somehow infringing on voter rights, Patrick said.
An example of that, she said, was a viral video of a voter in Illinois who violated electioneering laws that forbid campaigning within 100 feet of a polling place. The man was wearing a hat with a political endorsement on it — something that has been recognized as electioneering for decades — but claimed that he wasn’t being allowed to vote because of which candidate his hat endorsed.
The election workers told the man that they would give him a ballot if he removed his hat, but he refused.
“There is a heightened sense by some voters — and we’re talking about a small fraction of the voting population — that are going to take anything that they perceive as not being what they want to have happen as a personal affront or a violation to their voting rights,” Patrick said.
It’s challenging for researchers to gauge the prevalence of misinformation this year, as compared to years past, because the social media framework where it spreads is much more fractured than during previous elections, said Kharazian, the researcher for CIP.
But, she said she’s noticed that this year the people spreading disinformation are more practiced and voters are hearing the same rumors repeated over and over again.
“Voters have been primed by the election fraud narrative,” Kharazian said. “There’s a broader repertoire of rumors from which to choose.”
Another returning rumor this year is that voting machines, including the electronic ballot tabulators that Arizona uses to count its paper ballots, are easily hacked and cannot be trusted.
That claim, which was never proven in court despite lawsuits, along with others about alleged election fraud, is setting the scene for challenges to the election results, Carah Ong Whaley, vice president of Election Protection at Issue One, told the Mirror.
“They are setting up claims about the election to cast doubt, undermine confidence in the election and potentially litigate the actual results and will of voters,” Ong Whaley said, just as multiple candidates in Arizona did in 2022.
Issue One describes itself as a cross-partisan political organization with a goal of educating the public and bolstering elections through policy change.
Fighting back
Some good news, according to Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise, is that election officials and news organizations are getting ahead of some of the rumors this election cycle in a way that they didn’t in 2020 and 2022, a tactic called “prebunking.”
Examples include efforts at transparency by Maricopa County to educate voters about how the election process works and to provide tours of the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix, and the publication of articles like this one from Votebeat that explain to voters why tabulation of ballots in Maricopa County will likely be delayed this year.
But those efforts don’t always work. Some X users shared the Votebeat article along with comments accusing the media, without evidence, of covering up imagined malfeasance by Maricopa County.
Election officials still hope that their messages are reaching the people willing to listen.
During an Oct. 29 press conference, Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates told reporters that the county has a team dedicated to monitoring social media for misinformation and disinformation about the election.
Gates promised that the county will swiftly counter any misinformation that his team discovers, especially if it might deter Arizonans from voting or create confusion about the process.
“We know there’s great interest in this election this year, and we want people to have every opportunity they want to go ahead and vote. And if people are going to try to deter them by spreading misinformation, we’re going to respond to it very quickly with the facts,” Gates said.
Gates added that it doesn’t surprise him that people are already making unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in Maricopa County, nearly a week out from Nov. 5.
Ong Whaley said that fighting disinformation in the current climate is akin to throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.
Her organization’s top effort is to provide credible information about where and how to vote from reliable sources, like local election officials. Election Protection is also running advertisements and social media influencer campaigns and has a chatbot on Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and Whatsapp that can be used to report misinformation.
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