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So a thread on the electoral misinformation we're seeing and how to think about (most) of it. 
There's going to be a lot of misinformation out there, but it's important to realize most misinformation is going to be around "ballots lost/ballots discovered"
And I've said this before, but you have to understand the underlying conspiracy theory, or you won't get what's going on. The conspiracy prototype is *not* millions of undocumented immigrants voting. The conspiracy prototype is the Coleman/Franken recount.
The idea propagated back then and believed by the very online was that the Democratic party closed the polls at a loss (Coleman up), saw how many votes they were down, then created ballots which they arranged to magically find uncounted and run through the machines.
If you hang out on Twitter enough in the extremely online older GOP circles, you'll eventually see a reference to "trunk ballots", which refers to... well, I'll just let you look it up. But it's a set of "magically found" ballots according to the GOP.
The story in Minnesota in 2008 was smaller. The shift was hundreds of votes. But the story was essentially the same: focused on the idea that the Democratic party had engaged in a pre-planned ballot-stuffing operation using forged votes to come in just over what they needed.
It's not the newest story -- you'll find these stories told about the 1960 election in Chicago -- but what was newer was that it propagated in an environment which *should* have garnered more trust than older systems.
Election processes today are highly transparent, bipartisan, digitally verified, chain of custody, audited ordeals. Some states do better than others, and people do sometimes cheat at the margins, but reforms have made any grander ballot-stuffing almost impossible to hide.
That should have engendered trust, at least according to some theories. But the opposite was true -- with so much transparency the attack surface of disinformation was greater, not less.
In the subsequent years, the scale of the Base Theory of Democratic Ballot-Stuffing has gotten *more* grandiose as oversight and citizen access to info has increased.
In 2016, when this narrative was being prepped for an expected Trump loss, one very popular fake story showed a "photo" of preprinted boxes of ballots that Hillary Clinton was storing at an Ohio warehouse.
The idea -- wait until the Ohio votes came in, then grab what she needed, call it "late vote" and add it for a narrow victory.
Another freakout happened in Florida, where a box was found in a rental car marked "Provisional Ballots" -- in attempt to not fuel conspiracy theories, the police held it until it could be opened in public -- revealing it was being used for office supplies.
It turns out the boxes are always used for office supplies at the end of the night. There was no mystery. But in the interim, the conspiracy-verse went full yarn-board on connections.
Similarly in another race, grainy video was shown of poll workers loading ballots into personal cars. PERSONAL CARS!
Which... is how ballots are usually transported by law (chain of custody doesn't require you use a rental car).
Which... is how ballots are usually transported by law (chain of custody doesn't require you use a rental car).
What's the theory? That pre-filled ballots would be magically added while the poll workers drove their Honda to the truck that takes the ballots to the warehouse for secure storage. But everything had already been tabulated at the polling site, etc.
Anyway, this is the conspiracy theory now in play -- that Democrats now know how many votes they need, and are creating false opportunities to find those lost votes and use the library of ballots they have on hand, ready to swap or "find" in a trunk.
Along the way, the belief is, they may have to *destroy* certain Republican ballots so the numbers add up right. None of this makes any sense to people who look at election systems. But since 2008 it's increasingly become dogma on the right-wing web.
Anyway, some localities *are* crap at elections. Sometimes there *is* abuse of power. But none of it looks like this sort of thing that gets alleged, which would be the stupidest way to try to influence an election. (Yes, lets plan to find ballots *in a trunk*! Foolproof!)
In any case, if you're a reporter reading this and you write a headline with the phrase "Boxes of ballots found in closet!" instead of "Mislaid ballots verified by bipartisan committee, to be tabulated in Monday public session" be aware what fuel that headline is for what fire.
