Time November 2/November 9, 2020THE
VALIDATION OF
DISINFORMATION
BY GOVERNMENT
OFFICIALS
IS TURNING
FALSEHOODS
INTO TRUTHS
FA L SE
ALARM
HOW THE VOTER-FRAUD FALLACY IS MANUFACTURED
By Vera Bergengruen
“
The sTory sTarTed wiTh liTTle more Than a
vague rumor. “They found six ballots in an office yes-
terday in a garbage can,” President Donald Trump
told a Fox News radio show on Sept. 24. “They were
Trump ballots. Eight ballots in an office yesterday in
a certain state.” Four hours later, the White House
hinted to reporters that state was Pennsylvania. And
by that afternoon, the rumor had become official in
the form of an announcement by the U.S. Justice De-
partment. In a press release, federal prosecutors
declared that nine discarded ballots had been
found in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and
that seven of them were votes for Trump.
It is exceedingly rare for federal prose-
cutors to publicize an investigation that has
barely started and rarer still for them to re-
veal politically sensitive details in the pro-
cess. The case exploded on national news
and social media, with Republicans touting
it as evidence of a plot to rig the election and
Trump arguing the same thing during a na-
tional debate watched by 73 million viewers.
By the time Pennsylvania’s election chief ex-
plained a week later that the discarded bal-
lots were the result of an “error” by a con-
fused temporary employee, not “intentional
fraud,” the damage had been done.
Luzerne County is a case study in one of
the ugliest developments of the 2020 election,
in which the powers of federal, state and local govern-
ment have become tools of Trump’s voter- fraud dis-
information campaign. From formal announcements
by the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) to state-level “election
integrity” task forces, the President’s allies are mixing
politics and law enforcement to amplify his baseless
claim that the election is plagued by rampant voter
fraud. “They laundered the information through the
Justice Department, they teased it like it’s a PR cam-
paign, and then the story dropped in the form of an
official press release,” Ankush Khardori, a former DOJ
prosecutor, says of the Luzerne County case. “This
piece of information was tossed out and fed to the echo
chamber, where it will have a permanent existence.”
Many Americans likely recognize similar stories
from the nightly news or their Facebook feeds. The
case of three bundles of mail found in a ditch in Wis-
consin was touted by Republican candidates in states
from Illinois to Colorado. An ICE press release on al-
leged voter fraud by noncitizens in North Carolina
was picked up by conservative groups in California,
Ohio and Montana. Allegations of double voting in
the Georgia primary were promoted on Facebook by
the Texas GOP.
All these stories went viral before they had been
properly investigated. None of them has been found
by state or federal authorities to have prevented any-
one from voting or to have impacted the outcome
of an election. None indicates the widespread fraud
that Trump and his allies allege. That argument rests
“primarily on unsupported speculation and sec-
ondarily on isolated instances of voter fraud,” Judge
Robert Dow Jr. of the Northern District of Illinois,
a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his rejection
of a GOP effort to block state election officials from
sending mail-in ballots to voters. Even the isolated
incidents of real fraud, Dow wrote, prove that the
phenomenon “remained infinitesimally small.”
But there are signs the campaign to bolster the
voter-fraud myth may be achieving its goal. By vali-
dating disinformation, government officials are turn-
ing falsehoods into truths, at least in the minds of the
public. One in four American adults now says voter
fraud is a major problem with mail-in voting, accord-
ing to a Pew Research Center poll. This belief, which
state election officials and independent experts cat-
egorically reject, could undermine the results of the
No v. 3 election and lend credence to Trump’s claims
of a “rigged” contest. It could give rise to a broader
push for restrictive voting measures in the future.
And it has set a dangerous precedent in which the
powers of American government can be bent to dis-
seminate disinformation for the political purposes
of those in office.The day before the Pennsylvania ballot case
erupted, a local news station in Wisconsin posted a
107-word story that said the U.S. Postal Service was
investigating three trays of mail, including some ab-
sentee ballots, found in a ditch along a highway out-
side the town of Greenville. The sparse report rapidly
took on a life of its own. A write-up by the right-wing
website Breitbart News, titled mailed-in balloTs
found Tossed in wisconsin diTch, attracted
more than 68,000 comments, likes and shares on
Facebook, and was shared on Republican Facebook
pages in Tennessee, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Wash-
ington, North Carolina, California, Utah, Texas and
Florida. A summary by the Washington Examiner re-
ceived more than 250,000 interactions on Facebook.
Republican National Committee operatives, White
House officials and Trump himself invoked it as an
example of pervasive fraud.
When state election officials announced a week36