WASHINGTON — Two days after the 2020 presidential election, an anonymous online message alleged the U.S. Postal Service in Wisconsin had backdated ballot postmarks to mess with election results — a claim that was quickly debunked by fact-checkers and the USPS Inspector General’s office.
Nevertheless, it made the rounds in conservative media and even after it was debunked the author was invited to testify in December 2020 at a Wisconsin Assembly elections committee hearing.
That same committee has continued to investigate claims that former President Donald Trump was somehow cheated in Wisconsin, despite numerous reviews affirming President Joe Biden won the state by more than 20,000 votes. Just last week, the committee invited a speaker previously convicted of felony fraud to present findings from his own election review, though he failed to produce any substantive evidence.
The elevation of baseless claims like those about the USPS, which were revealed to be made by former United Mailing Services subcontractor Ethan Pease, underscore the heightened distrust in democracy and the election process — a problem experts say is exacerbated by the prevalence and popularity of misinformation.
“The amount of misinformation around the 2020 election was absolutely crazy and out of control,” said Yotam Ophir, a communications professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, whose research looks at media effects, persuasion and misinformation. “What’s amazing is that it was based on zero evidence.”
Ophir cited the large number of legal cases opened by the Trump campaign, all hinging on his insistence that the election had been stolen, and “none of which found any evidence for fraud.”
So, if false claims, like the backdating of Wisconsin ballots, can be so easily debunked, how do they still get traction?
“The American political system is so polarized, meaning people are so deeply kind of engaged with their own political party in a way that wasn’t the case 50, 60 years ago,” Ophir said.
A PolitiFact post and an AP story published in early December 2020 fact-checked Pease’s claims, and a USPS Inspector General report later that month found that no such ballots had been lost, and no backdated ballots had been counted.
But no backdated ballots would have been counted in any circumstance — Wisconsin law requires all ballots, including absentee ballots sent by mail, to be received before the end of Election Day. After the polls close, even ballots with an appropriate postmark will not be counted.
So even if there had been falsely postmarked ballots, they wouldn’t have been counted because they came in after polling places closed.
Lara Brown, a political scientist and director of the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, said misinformation, character assassination and “rumor mongering” have always been part of the political process.
Brown gave an example of what she characterized as a classic political campaign message that stokes conspiracy fears: “Washington is corrupt, or incumbents are corrupt, it’s all — the system’s rigged, and oh, by the way, you should vote for me because I’m honest and I’m going to change it.” Brown said.
“The more cynical you are, the more apt you are to believe somebody who is claiming everything is rigged, or that it’s all some kind of conspiracy,” she said. That’s because “when you have no trust for anyone, you tend to end up trusting the wrong people.”
What’s more, misinformation in the 2020 election wasn’t coming from fringe claimants only — it was coming from the president.
“It’s a reliable source, right? It’s not a weirdo on 8chan. It’s not somebody’s uncle, right? It’s the president of the United States,” Ophir said.
Trump’s messages were also backed by Republican leaders and conservative media — and Trump had already put in work to discredit Democratic leaders and mainstream media, creating “a monopoly over truth for his followers.”
The Internet should have made combating misinformation easier, Ophir said — with quick access to endless information, it seemed poised to make people more “effective in identifying deception and finding reliable sources.”
Instead, Brown said, the struggle now is “the scale at which people hear about these rumors,” and the speed at which it rockets to notoriety. A smaller, local issue or claim can quickly and easily become “a national piece of misinformation.”
Because there’s so much out there, the Internet allows people to “choose whatever information they want to be exposed to,” Ophir said. And algorithms customize users’ feeds based on their interests, siphoning out information at odds with those interests.
“Let’s say we want to find information that confirms my belief that the election was stolen,” Ophir posed the hypothetical. “Google will give me whatever I want, right? I mean, I can go online and write ‘evidence that the election was stolen’ and I’ll get gazillions of results in seconds.”
Earlier this month, over a year after the election and on the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Trump again alleged that the election had been fraudulent — and a recent Axios/Momentum poll showed only 55% of Americans believe Biden’s 2020 election was legitimate.
“This spiral of cynicism just is as damaging as the misinformation itself,” said Brown. She thinks there is a way to break the cycle — “small, slow, incremental wins over time” – but fears that politicians are too afraid of losing their seats and majorities to make the necessary adjustments to win back American trust.
Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have made efforts to curb the spread of misinformation: Instagram, for example, started adding pop-ups to posts about the pandemic.
Such efforts do have an effect, said Ophir: After former President Donald Trump’s account was blocked from Facebook and Twitter in 2021, there was “a dramatic decline in the amount of misinformation online, on those platforms.”
But Ophir says these efforts are akin to “looking for fires to put out every couple of days” instead of fixing the larger problems of policing misinformation online and restoring faith in the political and electoral process.
“It needs to be solved systematically,” said Ophir. Media literacy education and factchecking efforts will go a long way, but it’s also crucial for political parties to “take responsibility back” about misinformation they’re propagating — and to “work really hard to reestablish trust in institutions and in mainstream politics and mainstream media.”
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