Preventing Election Misinformation
The 2024 election season has come upon us with a wide variety of claims, counterclaims, and misinformation that leave ordinary voters struggling to tell truth from fiction. Especially worrying are assertions that the voting system is rigged through fraudulent votes and election workers tampering with the system. These false claims lead citizens to believe that the final count we all see on the news is not truly reflective of Americans' votes. Allegations like these have been proven false over and over again, but they still persist and cause voter anxiety and social turmoil.
R. Michael Alvarez, the Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science, long a student of voting behavior and election technologies, has been leading a research project on election integrity. The work involves auditing voting technologies to ensure they are sound, and tracking and rebutting dubious election claims. With this two-pronged approach, Alvarez aims to address the chasm between the well-documented integrity of U.S. elections and voters' persistent fears that parties behind the scenes are manipulating elections to suit their own agendas. As the election approaches, Alvarez has been disseminating a steady stream of blog posts and video interviews with election officials and creators of vote-counting technologies under the heading "Office Hours." On October 4, he will host an election roundtable with experts on voting behavior and vote counting technologies from the southern California area.
Concerns around voter fraud are nothing new in American politics. "We have surveys going back to 2006, and the consensus is that there are consistently 25 to 35 percent of registered voters, whether Republican, Democratic, or Independent, who think that voter fraud is actually happening," Alvarez explains. "These concerns have increased a little bit over time in the last couple of federal election cycles. But, in general, they've been quite stable. Our current data is remarkably consistent with what we saw in 2020."
Alvarez brings to the election integrity project not only his expertise in voting and elections, but an increasingly pointed focus on conspiracy theories of all kinds: who peddles them, who buys into them, what motivates them, how successful they are, and how adherents to conspiracy theories can be brought to a better understanding of the evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
In fall 2023, Alvarez and his colleagues at the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP) brought a group of researchers from various disciplines to Caltech for a research conference on conspiratorial thinking. "Interest in this area started to come to a head when conspiracy theories and denialism were becoming very visible during the pandemic," Alvarez says. Scholars increasingly direct attention to the phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking in general, irrespective of what any particular conspiracy theory is about. This type of thinking has many psychological and sociological correlates that hold across individuals, time, and the nature of any particular conspiracy.
In theory, then, effective modes of combating conspiracy theories should also prove to be multipurpose: The same basic techniques that defang a conspiracy theory about vaccines should also work to make claims about election fraud less palatable.
Drawing on other work in the area, Alvarez has focused attention on two forms of tackling misinformation: topic rebuttal and technique rebuttal. Topic rebuttal challenges misinformation with evidence, bringing to bear facts and counterclaims that undermine the strength of the conspiratorial claim. This, Alvarez points out, is familiar ground for scientists, since this is how scientific discourse works. Technique rebuttal, on the other hand, highlights the use of incorrect forms of reasoning, including, for example, the selective use of evidence or reliance on fake experts.
Alvarez's 2024 election misinformation project spent the summer field testing various forms of rebuttal to see which are most effective, and then deploying them to a group of stakeholders and election officials who are using them to combat misinformation in the run up to the election.
Following the November 5 election, Alvarez's team will audit voting in partnership with election officials in southern California. Researchers are already reviewing the voter registration database. After the election, they will examine the results of vote-by-mail ballot returns and in-person observations of polling place operations. This is a tricky step, Alvarez notes. "Scientists don't operate on the same timeline as the media," he says. "The media want to report on the election's integrity the day after the election, but to be honest, we just don't have the data at that point. Votes are not even completely counted yet. So, our biggest challenge is trying to get credible scientific research done quickly enough that it can help mitigate any false claims of election fraud."
Once available, audit reports will be distributed to stakeholders and election officials for post-election rebuttal of misinformation. The team then plans to review the efficacy of their work internally and disseminate those results in December 2024. The project will wrap up with a conference at Caltech on January 16–17, 2025, immediately prior to the presidential inauguration.
"We have to do what we can to give people the tools to better understand voting and to make their own minds up about the integrity of the process," Alvarez says. "And it's something Caltech should be involved in. We're scientists, and we should be providing nonpartisan data and factual information to try to keep the election process moving forward accurately and fairly."
Preventing Election Misinformation and Election Crises in Southern California is funded by The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation.
