The Effect of Voter and Election Fraud Misperceptions on U.S. Election Legitimacy
Recent elections in the United States and Brazil have been marred by accusations of election fraud. Researchers experimented with two ways of addressing falsehoods: The first tactic used prebunking, which educates people about election security before misinformation spreads, while the second approach asked credible sources to endorse election results.
Researchers surveyed U.S. participants three times between October 2022 and January 2023. A similar survey was sent to Brazilians once between February and March 2023. The results revealed:
Prebunking is slightly more effective than using credible sources.
Prebunking does not need to mention future misinformation campaigns to be effective. Election officials can engage in public discussions about election security without being perceived as engaging in partisan politics.
The margin of victory and the race/ethnicity of the winning candidate did not change people’s confidence in election results.
In the 2022 Arizona election, false allegations gained traction that conservative votes were not being counted. After election officials debunked those claims, more people perceived the Democratic candidate as the rightful winner. The change in beliefs about corruption, however, did not extend to other election fraud allegations in the 2020 and 2022 elections.
The MIT Election Data and Science Lab helps highlight new research and interesting ideas in election science, including through research grants under our Learning from Elections program.
The research highlighted on this page was conducted by John Carey, Brian Fogarty, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, supported by funding from this program. The information and opinions expressed in these materials represent their own research, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the MIT Election Lab or MIT.
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Contributors
This research was conducted as part of the Learning from Elections initiative. It was authored by:
- John Carey, Dartmouth College
- Brian Fogarty, University of Notre Dame
- Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College
- Jason Reifler, University of Exeter