Election disinformation harms communities and democracy
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three articles examining how disinformation, and those peddling it, are impacting the election.
Former President Donald Trump’s sustained efforts to undermine confidence in 2020 election results helped create a wave of election deniers and conspiracy theories that seem to have touched every corner of the country. This includes a cottage industry of what can be considered professional election deniers who continue to present their false narratives about elections and supposed voter fraud to communities across the nation. Additionally, some elected officials, including county clerks and sheriffs, use their positions to put election denier conspiracy theories into real-world practice. One such official who turned conspiracy theories into criminal action is former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters. On Oct. 4, she stood before a judge and defended her actions as she faced sentencing for four felony counts involving a data breach in which she had allowed unauthorized access to voting machines after the 2020 election.
Peters insisted the machines had been rigged, despite the lack of any evidence. Colorado District Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced her to nine years in prison. But not before scolding her.
“I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could,” Barrett told Peters. “You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen. You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.”
Peters had promoted Trump’s “Big Lie,” the false claim that widespread election fraud cost him a second term. She was just one of many politicians, election officials and political operatives caught up in the web of lies spun by Trump and allies including Rudy Giuliani. Now, even after four years – and scores of court reviews that found no evidence to support claims of a stolen election – millions of Americans still believe them. If a recent Economist/YouGov poll is any indication, Trump’s disinformation campaign could be causing lasting damage to the country’s faith in democracy.
The poll found that four in 10 Trump supporters have little or no confidence that the 2024 election results will be fair. As The Washington Post notes, the survey also found that 57% of Republicans are “very concerned” that there will be election fraud this year, compared to just 40% who thought fraud was “very likely” in 2020.
The fact is, U.S. politics has long been fertile ground for disinformation and “conspiratorial fantasy” – an “arena for angry minds,” as the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter put it in his famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”
That “paranoid style” was once kept to the fringes of politics in the U.S. No longer. Today, the internet provides an unfiltered megaphone for far-right extremists to amplify disinformation and reach millions of Americans in the blink of an eye through popular social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook and others.
The world saw the result when extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. As the 2024 election approaches, it’s certainly possible the nation will witness another upheaval. At the very least, the election conspiracy theories and false claims about election fraud will continue to erode confidence in fair elections, giving the far-right extremists more influence in their fight to fundamentally change U.S. governance in the direction of authoritarianism.
Amplifying the Big Lie
There is no question that Trump is the father of the Big Lie campaign. Even before the 2020 election, he sowed seeds of doubt in the integrity of the 2020 election.
But soon after the election, domestic extremists began hosting events about the Big Lie and promoting it on both fringe and mainstream media. They became some of the most influential voices helping to normalize the conspiracy theories surrounding the election and, at the same time, oppose democracy and support political violence on the right.
Hard-right extremists who coordinated, promoted and/or attended “Stop the Steal” events around the country include:
- The Proud Boys, the self-described “Western chauvinists” whom Trump once told to “stand back and stand by.”
- Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist livestreamer who once dined with Trump.
- Members and officials of the Oath Keepers militia, which played a key role in the insurrection.
- Infowars’ Alex Jones and Owen Shroyer, known for their roles in radicalizing people, propagating conspiracy theories and fomenting harassment.
The election officials and others who have been targeted by Trump and his supporters are numerous. They include election workers and the voting system company used by many counties to tabulate votes. Additional targets include the “deep state,” a term meant to describe members of the government following their own rogue agendas, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the entire Democratic Party, George Soros, and undocumented migrants, who somehow, according to the conspiracy theorists, managed to vote in the millions without anyone catching them.
This vast array of villains created a scenario where believers were able to choose who they believed was behind the “fraud” and, in some cases, target these groups with hateful rhetoric, threats and actual violence.
In high-profile cases, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his family, as well as Georgia election workers, received death threats. This has also been true for election workers across the country, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In one of the worst cases of violence, a man attacked the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer in their home, fracturing his skull. The assailant was sentenced to 30 years in prison in May.
Racism pervaded these conspiracy theories in multiple ways. Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, who was baselessly accused of changing votes in the election, received racist voicemails. Allegations that George Soros was involved have been fraught with antisemitism and the racist “great replacement” theory, which asserts that nonwhite migrants are coming to the U.S. at the behest of Democrats/liberals/globalists to replace the white population. This baseless, racist conspiracy theory has grown in popularity, according to a poll conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It dovetails with Trump’s false claim that noncitizen migrants voted in large numbers in the last election.
In some cases, the extremists who fanned the flames of the Big Lie have grown immensely in popularity, especially among Trump supporters. They manipulate that desire to recruit new members into their groups, while also making money off related events, media and merchandise. They have also been influential in getting local public officials involved in investigating the election and influencing counties to drop their voting machines and move to hand counts. Alternately, their actions have gotten some election deniers into legal trouble for allegedly defaming Dominion Voting Systems and its chief engineer, which are named in one or more lawsuits that are still in progress. However, these allegations have already cost Fox News $787 million in a pretrial settlement. Election denial has also cost one denier, Mike Lindell, millions of dollars for hosting a contest titled “Prove Mike Wrong,” which dared someone to find errors in his conspiracy theory. A man named Robert Zeidman, who has said he originally trusted Lindell’s claims, found a data error, and when Lindell refused to pay up, the courts demanded he keep his promises and pay $5 million to the contest winner.
The cottage industry – from law enforcement to cranks
The actions of Peters, the former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk, and her subsequent prosecution made her a hero among election deniers, such as Lindell and Joe Oltmann, leader of the group Faith Education Commerce, aka FEC United. Oltmann has made repeated comments calling for violence against public officials and dedicated much of his online show to election disinformation. Another Peters supporter is David Clements, a former professor at New Mexico State University who has toured the country claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Some members of law enforcement, influenced by constitutional sheriff groups like the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) and Protect America Now (PAN), have teamed up with election conspiracy group True the Vote. True the Vote has called on law enforcement to involve themselves in elections and instigate rogue investigations into the election. This election cycle, True the Vote rolled out an app that allows people to follow the latest in election conspiracy theories and report supposed fraud that users observe.
Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff Calvin Hayden lost his 2024 primary election, which was likely a result of his yearlong investigation into supposed election fraud. Dar Leaf, CSPOA advisory board member and sheriff of Barry County, Michigan, attempted to seize voting equipment in 2022 as part of his effort to prove Trump really won the 2020 election.
When sheriffs act on these conspiracy theories, the credibility that comes with being a law enforcement officer helps them support the false narratives that criminal actions are undermining our elections. While sheriffs may play a part in creating a safe environment around the election process, they do not have the power to oversee or interfere with voting and tabulation. As the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection notes, efforts by constitutional sheriffs to intervene in elections “raises serious potential for voter intimidation and election meddling that poses a threat to free and fair elections.” These groups and individuals have become part of a cottage industry that has promoted election denialism across the country since 2020. More broadly, they peddle disinformation and conspiracy theories, as the individual election deniers turn a profit.
Other key figures in this cottage industry of election denial include:
- Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne.
- Former Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who is possibly the most influential election denier in the U.S. and is a promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory and martial law.
- Attorney Kash Patel.
- Veteran Ivan Raiklin, who most recently made a hit list of people for Trump to arrest without cause.
Members of this industry have held meetings and seminars across the country where the public is invited to come and hear conspiracy theories and disinformation. They have spoken at political-religious revivals such as Reawaken America, where speakers have claimed post-2020 election that Trump was still president. Many of them presented at a three-day-long “Cyber Symposium,” held in August 2021 and hosted by Lindell, as well as other election-denial events.
Radicalizing citizens into believing election conspiracy theories is one of the devastating effects of the Big Lie and the industry that grew up around it – especially when the amount of attempted and real violence based on it is considered.
Claiming noncitizens will decide the 2024 election
As the 2024 election season has rolled on, another conspiracy theory popularized during the previous cycle has been reintroduced by hate groups and such politicians as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. The conspiracy theory involves outrageous claims that undocumented immigrants are being let into the country to vote. The anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Family Research Council recently claimed that as many as 2.7 million undocumented immigrants will vote in this year’s election. The hate group also said that a “ponderous number of unlawful votes may just be the tip of the iceberg.” In an email to supporters, FRC was more explicit, stating, “Leftists want to unconstitutionally give noncitizens the right to vote in our elections to weaken the power of your vote and shore up their power in local, state, and federal offices.” This conspiracy theory has become a major talking point about the upcoming election. A group formed by Trump supporters called the Only Citizens Vote Coalition is promoting conspiracy theories about immigrants, hoping to post threatening signs at polling places, and blaming the political left for stealing the election before it has even happened.
The reality is that various audits show that noncitizen voting rarely, if ever, happens. Even when it does, the percentages don’t come close to being able to swing an election. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed local election officials in the 42 jurisdictions with the highest immigrant populations. It found only 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting in the 2016 elections out of 23.5 million votes cast, or 0.0001%. A Georgia audit in 2022 looked over the past 25 years and found fewer than 1,700 people believed to be noncitizens had attempted to register to vote, with none of them being able to cast ballots.
Despite no evidence that it’s a real problem, the repetition of the conspiracy theory by election deniers and some public officials has made many Americans think noncitizen voting is a legitimate issue. A September 2024 poll by Scripps News/Ipsos found 51% of the population was concerned about noncitizens voting, with 36% of those respondents being “very concerned” about it. One result of this paranoia is that election officials, in the name of purging noncitizens from voting rolls, end up removing U.S. citizens. In the end, it’s citizens who get disenfranchised as officials try to root out the imaginary influence of noncitizens.
Many tricked into believing voter fraud conspiracy theories
Polling illustrates the impact election deniers and their conspiracy theories have. When it comes to this year’s election, the September 2024 poll by Scripps News/Ipsos found 50% of the general population worried about “widespread voter fraud,” while 49% worried their vote wouldn’t be counted. The work done by election deniers has trained citizens, not only on election conspiracy theories, but on other extreme beliefs. As a result, voters have learned electoral disinformation, which has had the effect of lessening their trust in government and their fellow citizens, while they became supporters, and even members, of a variety of extremist groups, leading to increased hate and extremism in the U.S.
Editor’s note: This is the first part of a three-part series. The next one will examine more closely the cottage industry of election deniers. The last article in the series will look at two examples of communities successfully pushing back against the false conspiracy theories of election deniers.
Picture at top: When extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it was the culmination of efforts to undermine confidence in the 2020 election results. Conspiracy theories continue during this election cycle.
