Videos Alleging Voter Fraud Lead to Threats: NPR

A voter enters the Bucks County Administration Building in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, on October 31, 2024.

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Two days before Halloween, a Pennsylvania postal worker delivered a box of mailed-in ballots to the Northampton County Courthouse. A man filming on his cell phone began asking questions and followed the postal worker into the building.

The man who took the photos was told that the man with the ballot box was a postal worker.

“I don’t know, apparently he’s at the post office, but that looks very suspicious,” the man filming said, zooming in on what he said was “an obscene amount of ballots.”

The video was then zoomed in to give a close-up of the postal worker's face. As of November 2nd, it had nearly six million views.

County officials in Pennsylvania confirmed to local news outlets that the man filmed in the video was an acting postmaster doing his job. After the video went online, he received threats.

Even before Election Day, unfounded rumors of voter fraud begin to focus on specific officials and voters. In 2020, this type of online activity resulted in harassment and threats and ultimately played a role in sparking the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

But this year, videos like these are popping up in a special community on Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly Twitter, inviting more speculation of the same kind that can lead to threats and harassment.

Raising concerns and trying to understand the voting process is a normal part of a free and fair electoral process, said Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and an expert on election disinformation. “But there’s a really big difference between talking about a cause and showing someone your face and accusing them of treason.”

DiResta said that in 2020, many major social media platforms tried more to add context and amplify information from credible sources. Under pressure from Republicans, many platforms have since backed away from this policy. Perhaps the most important factor has been Twitter's transformation into X since billionaire Elon Musk purchased it in 2022, steadily transforming the platform into a pro-conservative social media site with minimal moderation policies.

“I would say, however, that the biggest difference this time is that X hosts the communities where these types of sensemaking efforts take place,” DiResta said.

Over the past year, Musk has become a key supporter of Donald Trump's campaign and has himself become an enthusiastic spreader of voter fraud rumors, crowdsourcing incidents of potential voter fraud, quickly building a large following of more than 60,000 users.

“Most of the people responding to the posts are convinced that the election is being stolen, and so it feels like it's more of a place where they're just trying to gather evidence to prove that what happened happened “They've already decided,” DiResta said. “And they're worried about it because they keep hearing it from political elites that they trust — people like Donald Trump and people like Elon Musk.”

Each individual post, DiResta said, was woven into a much larger narrative from politicians and pro-Trump influencers, often with conspiratorial undertones. The consolidation is intended to imply that the evidence of voter fraud is massive and insurmountable, despite more than 60 lawsuits, multiple recounts and election audits that found no evidence of significant voting irregularities in 2020.

X did not respond to a request for comment from NPR.

Burned by electoral lies

The impact on everyday people who get caught up in these conspiracy theories is profound.

The legal nonprofit Protect Democracy helped file a series of defamation lawsuits against election deniers after the 2020 election, “on behalf of people who were suddenly lied to in public about claiming they had broken the law.” even though they hadn’t done so by law,” said Jane Bentrott, a consultant at Protect Democracy.

Pro-Trump supporters and partisan media organizations like One America News publicly retracted the allegations and settled with the people they falsely accused of voter fraud.

Georgia election official Shaye Moss, right, leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. District Court in Washington, DC on December 15, 2023. A jury ordered Rudy Giuliani, the former personal attorney for former President Donald Trump, to pay $148 million in damages to two Fulton County election workers, Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman.

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One high-profile case involving Protect Democracy is a defamation lawsuit against Trump's then-lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who baselessly accused two Georgia election workers by name of manipulating ballots.

Giuliani was found liable for defamation and a jury awarded the couple $148 million last year.

“The flame that Giuliani lit with these lies and passed on to so many others changed every aspect of our lives. Our home, our family, our work, our sense of security, our mental health,” said Shaye Moss, one of the workers. after the jury had reached its verdict.

“He has learned,” Bentrott said, “and hopefully others who are paying attention have learned, that people who falsely accuse others of breaking the law can face significant consequences for those lies.”

But even successful defamation cases often take years to resolve, and Giuliani still has to pay the women.

Protect Democracy sought to hold prominent figures like Giuliani accountable for spreading false accusations. But overall, according to DiResta, the media landscape to which these influencers belong has remained intact.

“What you see is a pipeline where someone makes an allegation, usually a small account, a person with a very big issue that feels very real to them, but it gets picked up by a person who maybe ten to “It has hundreds of thousands of followers.”

DiResta has examined how the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 was motivated in part by belief in the messages generated by this pipeline.

The day after the Pennsylvania postal worker's video was posted, the creator wrote “We're in search of the truth, whatever that may be.” As of November 2, the video remains online.

DiResta said she is confident that American election officials are better prepared for the upcoming election, but ultimately, “the tone is still set from the top. People on social media are capable of presenting evidence, but they do so within the framework set by political leaders.”