“We predicted that legal errors and issues with the election infrastructure would be redefined as fraud,” Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies the spread of disinformation, told CNN. That appears to be exactly what happened in Maricopa County on Election Day. Right-wing figures, who have spent the past two years convincing millions of Americans to distrust their democracy, pointed to this Election Day problem with printers at some Maricopa polling places as proof that everything they had been saying was right. The printer problem wasn’t a mistake, they suggested – it was a scam. The reality of any election day in the United States is that issues will arise at the polls. We can support whether this is unacceptable or unavoidable, a result of incompetence or aging infrastructure. But it is quite another to suggest, without evidence, that these issues are the result of a nefarious and elaborate attempt to “steal” an election. Election deniers in 2020 attributed malice to the mundane, repeatedly claiming videos showed poll workers stealing the election, when in fact the videos showed them doing their jobs. Having studied this, Starbird and her colleagues at the University of Washington and the Stanford Internet Observatory published a report last month looking at “implicit intent.” “In elections, honest human error can be opportunistically exploited to deliberately imply and support unfounded narratives of deliberate, widespread fraud, undermining the legitimacy of election results. However, as research shows, voter fraud is extremely rare and such errors are unlikely to affect election results,” they wrote. It all started early this election day when a Republican activist posted a video on Twitter showing a Maricopa poll worker explaining there was a problem that could cause delays. For those waiting to claim the election was a fraud, it was a gift and it could hardly have come from a better place. To read more about election conspiracies in Maricopa County, click here.
