Alert: Track Midterm Election Day Misinformation Right Here
Election Day is a perfect environment for misinformation to spread, whether it’s through coordinated campaigns or honest error—or a mix of both. The stakes are high, there’s a lot of breaking news, and the US voting system isn’t always the most intuitive. Social media didn’t create misinformation, but as Emily Dreyfuss wrote last week, it can certainly add fuel to the fire. And the 2018 midterms have been, as the kids say, lit.
WIRED will update this page throughout Election Day to track the biggest stories, the most common hoaxes, and the likeliest sources of confusion as they emerge online. If you’re looking for ways to follow the election results tonight, Pia Ceres has you covered here. And most important of all, go vote!
Facebook Blocks More Accounts on the Eve of Elections
Late Monday night, Facebook announced it had identified dozens of accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “may be engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior” after US law enforcement alerted the company to some online activity they believe might be linked to foreign entities. So far, the company says it has blocked around 30 Facebook accounts, whose associated pages were mostly in French and Russian, and 85 Instagram accounts, which were mostly in English and covered a mix of celebrities and politics. The company says it will investigate further.
“Typically, we would be further along with our analysis before announcing anything publicly,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, wrote in a post announcing the action. “But given that we are only one day away from important elections in the US, we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today.” The news comes a little over a week after Facebook took down another coordinated network; that one, which the company said originated in Iran, appeared to follow the playbook Russian trolls perfected during the 2016 election: posing as US citizens to drive engagement around divisive social issues and national events. As of Tuesday morning, the company had not identified any foreign entities connected to the blocked accounts.
Customs and Border Patrol Plans, Then Cancels, a Controversial Show of Force
There’s no outright deception here, but plenty of room for misunderstanding. On Monday, the CBP announced that it would engage in a “mobile field force demonstration,” showing off its crowd control expertise—in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in El Paso, on Election Day. After civil rights groups expressed concerns that the exercise could double as voter intimidation, the Texas Civil Rights Project confirmed that CBP called it off an hour before the scheduled start time.
John Moore/Getty Images
So if you see reports about the CBP potentially intimidating voters in Texas senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s backyard, know that they’re outdated—but only as of very recently.
Black Panthers Are Not Intimidating Voters at the Polls in Georgia
The race for governor of Georgia, between sitting Republican secretary of state Brian Kemp and Democratic former state representative Stacey Abrams, has become one of the dirtiest contests in the nation. Kemp, who as secretary of state oversees Georgia’s voter rolls, has been accused of systematically disenfranchising people, particularly African Americans. Over the weekend, he accused the Democratic Party of hacking without citing evidence. And on Monday, Kemp, who is white, engaged in racial fear-mongering, tweeting that “The Black Panther Party is backing my opponent. RT if you think Abrams is TOO EXTREME for Georgia!” Abrams is African American, as is 30.2 percent of the state, according to the US Census.
The tweet linked to a Breitbart article, which took an image, posted to Facebook by a group identifying itself as The New Black Panther Party, of a small “armed rally against voter disenfranchisement” held on November 3. The article compares that rally, which appeared to have no more than five Black Panthers in attendance based on a review of 22 photos the group put on Facebook, to the thousand-person-plus rally Trump held for Kemp that same night.
Kemp’s supporters are using the same images to claim that Black Panthers are intimidating voters at the polls. One post shared in a Facebook group called Trump Train, which has more than 54,000 members, urged people to call police if they saw Black Panthers at the polls: “Black Panthers, a radicalized-racist militant group, are armed with assult weapons roaming the streets and neighborhoods as well as the voting polls in Georgia to intimidate and ‘persuade’ Voters to vote for the far-left democrat candidate, Stacey Abrams for Governor.”
The New Black Panthers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But it is clear that these images have been taken by Kemp’s supporters out of context—they do not show armed individuals at the polls in Georgia, but rather a small gathering that happened on Saturday on a street corner in Atlanta.
George Soros Does Not Own Smartmatic Voting Machines (And If He Did It Wouldn’t Matter)
Various alarmed citizens are claiming that George Soros owns Smartmatic voting machines, and will use them to tip the election to the favor of Democrats in 16 states. “ALERT: On Election Day if your voting machine is a SmartMatic brand request a paper ballot. SOROS owns SmartMatic brand,” a typical entreaty starts.
It’s a rumor that has circulated since at least 2012, found oxygen in conservative media in 2016, and is untrue. As Snopes points out, the chairman of UK-based Smartmatic does sit on the board of Soros’s Open Society Foundation, but the connections end there. And even if you still thought Soros was using that loose affiliation to somehow alter votes, the fact is that zero US precincts are using Smartmatic voting machines this year. They didn’t in 2016, either.
So if your voting machine is a Smartmatic brand, don’t request a paper ballot. Buy a plane ticket back home to the US, and go to your actual polling place.
MSNBC Did Not Show “Rigged” Florida Election Results Early On Air
On Monday, MSNBC erroneously ran a graphic showing results for the Florida gubernatorial race… a day before voting had even begun. The fake tally had Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum leading Republican Ron DeSantis by .6 percentage points, with 99 percent of the votes reported as counted.
The network quickly owned up to its mistake. All In host Chris Hayes clarified shortly after that the seemingly prophetic graphic was caused by a system error, which “inadvertently populated some test numbers” on-screen. “Obviously, we do not yet have any vote totals here, the night before the election,” said Hayes. “That was a misfire. Don’t worry. I was pretty confused when I saw it up there, to see it myself.”
Regardless, the image is currently circulating on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Voat, and other platforms as “evidence” the election is rigged. “Soros has rigged the election outcome in Florida and MSNBC already got the results,” reads one post on pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald with over 2,800 upvotes. Tweets from far-right commentators like Pamela Geller, Jack Posobiac and Jim Hoft have only further muddied the waters.
Undocumented Immigrants Are Not Voting in Droves
The same falsehood pops up every election: that noncitizens are voting in vast numbers. This is not, and has never been true, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which looked into the issue after President Trump claimed millions of non-citizens cast illegal votes in the 2016 election and found less than 50 cases nationwide. But in 2018, it remains a popular far-right conspiracy theory, playing into fears of illegal immigration. (According to Google Trends, “immigration” has been the second-most searched for election topic this week.)
The misinformation this year has come from elected officials and average Americans alike. President Trump tweeted that he’d told law enforcement to watch out for illegal voting, but ProPublica found that no law enforcement agency would confirm that they’d been contacted about it. Georgia Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp sent out a robocall saying his opponent Stacey Abrams wanted undocumented immigrants to vote. A meme circulating on Facebook urges Republican voters in mostly-Democratic California to “Vote Red in California—offset one vote by an illegal alien.” Well-known conservative writer Larry Schweikart falsely claimed that Democratic Senate Candidate Beto O’Rourke is paying “illegals” in Texas to vote for him against incumbent Ted Cruz.
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