Conspiracy theorists and foreign players are escalating unsubstantiated charges of fraud that mirror Trump’s accusations against Harris as Election Day approaches.
As millions of Americans cast their ballots in the 2024 US presidential election, internet provocateurs are raising concerns about the voting process’s legitimacy, causing disinformation to spread on an unprecedented scale.
Conspiracy theorists and foreign players are escalating unsubstantiated claims of fraud as Election Day approaches, echoing Donald Trump’s assertions that the outcome is untrustworthy if he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris. By spreading false claims of polling station closures and phony photos of votes that have been destroyed, they are utilizing Elon Musk’s X and other social media platforms to instill suspicion among voters.
According to US officials and disinformation specialists, some of the most recent election-related hoaxes are being carried out by agents connected to American enemies, such as Russia. As part of a larger attempt by Moscow to sow discord in the US, US security officials accused Russian influence players on Friday of creating a film that fabricated images of Haitian migrants casting ballots in the hotly disputed state of Georgia.
Voting rights organizations have cautioned that purposefully disseminating rumors and incorrect information may cause Americans to choose not to vote or to believe that the election would be fair. The former president may challenge the result, as he did following his defeat in 2020, thanks to doubts being raised by Trump and his supporters, notably the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
Carah Ong Whaley, director of election protection at Issue One, a nonpartisan research tank that focuses on electoral reform, said, “There’s a lot of crazy going on.”
Election-related misinformation has always existed, she claimed. However, in 2024, “I don’t think we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes the sheer volume of different sets and facts and beliefs about election integrity.”
X and the Trump and Harris camps did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Although it is challenging to measure how these narratives affect voting behavior, polling data indicates that confidence in election outcomes has drastically decreased over the last two US elections. According to a Gallup poll issued in September, just 28% of Republicans overall say they have trust in the accuracy of outcomes, compared to 44% in 2020 and 55% in 2016. The Gallup data showed that 84% of Democrats expressed confidence in the election outcome, up from 76% in 2020 but somewhat lower than 85% in 2016.
According to Gallup, 70% of Republicans say they are confident in the integrity of the vote at their local polling station. Researchers claim that the degree to which GOP voters have faith in their own election offices indicates that internet conspiracies are at least partially to blame for the general lack of confidence in the outcomes.
According to William Pelfrey Jr., a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in domestic terrorism, “some of these conspiracies don’t make any damn sense, but they’re still propagating and influencing people’s faith in the electoral process.”
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence swiftly said that the phony film, which social media users had grabbed, was the product of Russian agents and allegedly showed someone in Pennsylvania ripping up votes. However, phony films on that subject have reinforced skepticism about election integrity expressed by well-known Republicans.
On Thursday, JD Vance, the vice presidential candidate, tweeted a video that implied Democrats had prevented voters in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from casting ballots. Due to a misunderstanding, those waiting in line to apply for a mail-in ballot were momentarily informed they couldn’t be accommodated, according to Bucks County authorities on X. Voters will still be able to pick up their ballots in person or have them mailed to them, according to the county.
Despite that justification, false videos about the incident have persisted online, with some people accusing Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, of meddling in the election. Musk shared similar assertions with his more than 200 million X followers, and Trump has also asserted—without providing any supporting evidence—that there was rampant fraud in the state in postings on his Truth Social network.
Anti-misinformation experts say internet conspiracies have also focused on rumors about non-citizens voting unlawfully. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a charity that promotes laws to combat extremism, a network of fake X accounts has been posing as foreigners in recent weeks and publicly declaring that they want to cast ballots in the election.
One X account declared, “As a European national, I will unlawfully vote for Donald Trump.” According to ISD, a sample of 50 accounts in the networks had over 14 million views, and the posts—including one that X promoted with a push notification—received over 11.7 million views on the platform.
Similar rhetoric has been propagated by propaganda organizations outside of the United States. According to the Justice Department, a Russian misinformation network called Doppelganger attempted to inundate social media with websites that mimicked American media institutions including Fox News and the Washington Post. The material on those phony websites would then criticize Western backing for Ukraine and disparage Harris and President Joe Biden.
In contrast to previous election cycles, major social media corporations are not actively addressing inaccurate or misleading material during the 2024 contest. In September, the Justice Department said that it would not request that platforms take down potentially dangerous posts that might be linked to foreign perpetrators.
In 2020, Twitter pledged to alert users to misleading content and stated that it will conceal posts from well-known political personalities that included inaccurate information. The website that Musk now owns, X, has developed into a hotbed of conspiracy theories against immigrants and claims that Democrats are trying to rig the election.
As it did in 2020, Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms Inc., no longer labels postings that include election-related content and directs users to its voting information center. Additionally, Meta no longer suggests political postings to the majority of people on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
The degree to which independent watchdogs may scrutinize political narratives that gain traction has been restricted due to the significant marginalization of outside groups that previously exposed lies. This year, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which monitored false information, shut down after conservative organizations and Republican politicians charged researchers of restricting online free expression.
Washington’s intelligence services have accelerated their disclosure of foreign attempts to influence US political views as misinformation campaigns ramp up. Details of these initiatives have been made public in recent weeks by state authorities, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the ODNI. The strategy differs significantly from the Obama administration’s strategy of mainly remaining silent on Russian interference before to the 2016 presidential election.
George Barnes, the former deputy director of the National Security Agency, stated that operationalizing intelligence is necessary for the government to position itself to dominate the narrative. “You must take intelligence-based action. Indeed, both in the public and classified domains. You must have the public’s confidence.
