Mishaps, distrust spur Election Day misinformation

Voters casting ballots in Tuesday's pivotal midterms grappled with misleading claims about glitchy election machines and delayed results, the final crest of a wave of misinformation that's expected to linger long after the last votes are tallied.

In Arizona, news of snags with vote tabulators spawned baseless claims about vote rigging, which quickly jumped from fringe sites popular with the far-right to mainstream platforms. It didn't matter that local officials were quick to report the problem and debunk the theory.

In Pennsylvania, election officials pushed back on baseless claims that delays in counting the vote equate to election fraud. But the conspiracy theory spread anyway, thanks in part to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and other prominent Republicans who have amplified the idea.

There was lots of other misinformation too: false claims about ballots cast by non-citizens or dead people; hoaxes about voting machines that automatically change ballots and tales of suspicious Wi-Fi networks at election offices.

The states and facts involved were all different, but most of the misinformation aimed at voters this year had the same drumbeat: American elections can no longer be trusted.

“People were looking for things to go wrong to prove their preconceived notions that the election was rigged,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan organization that tracks misinformation. ”And there are always things that go wrong.”

If 2020 is any guide, many of the claims the emerged Tuesday will persist for days, weeks and even years, despite efforts by election officials, journalists and others to debunk them.

Three was a sharp uptick in social media posts Monday and Tuesday claiming Democrats would use delays in...