Most election fraud claims still have very simple explanations.

New examples are already popping up ahead of Election Day.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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In 2020, my popularity as a journalist grew after I started an X (then Twitter) thread tracking, explaining, and sometimes debunking claims of election fraud.

To this day, thousands of Tangle readers are here because of that thread, which ended up totaling over 400 posts in the weeks after the election. It was a really difficult time, but I was able to reach a lot of people, and it remains some of the work that I am proudest of as a journalist.

In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed many of these same claims popping back up again. So I started a new thread for 2024, and I am going to do my best to continue to track, investigate, and explain allegations of fraud during this cycle. When it looks like someone has actually been caught doing something illegal, I'll say so. When I can't explain or get to the bottom of a claim, I'll say that, too.

I will approach all of this with an open mind, because if a political party or a group is trying to steal an election, it would be the highlight of my journalistic career to follow the threads and prove it. Here is how I explained my approach to assessing these claims when writing about the film 2,000 Mules:

I consider myself to be both a skeptic and an open-minded person. I am deeply cynical about our government, believe intelligence agencies are covering up the truth about UFOs (yes, I'm still trying to find time for that newsletter), and don't feel any particular loyalty to the major political parties. I generally distrust authority, government agencies, and politicians, but I do believe it's wise to consult expert opinions and advice. I love a good conspiracy, a good cover-up, and a great story, and I’ve learned over the years that identifying motives is often the best way to accurately suss out what is going on.

A stolen presidential election would be an all-timer in every regard, a story so gigantic — a conspiracy of corruption and power so unthinkable — that the idea alone is tantalizing enough I almost want to believe it (aside from, you know, the fact that it'd destroy our democracy).

Fortunately (because I do not want it to be the case that our elections are being stolen), four years later, a lot of the same claims I investigated in 2020 are being recycled. And a lot of them still have very simple, innocuous explanations. More often than not, people see a video or image online or read an article without understanding how elections work, and then assume the worst of all the people involved.

So, today, I'm going to do a few things that I hope are helpful as we head into Election Day:

1) I'm going to share some examples of election fraud claims and explain how I know they are bogus, so you can see how this work is done.

2) I'm going to remind you what we’ve learned about the 2020 election fraud claims in the four years since they were made.

3) I'm going to share some rules for how to navigate claims of information online. These are basic rules that require no expertise to understand but will help you separate the real stuff from the B.S.

Some examples of election fraud claims.

When I logged into X the other day, I was frustrated — and a bit floored — to be confronted with an allegation of fraud that I remembered from 2020. Here is a screenshot of the post:

This video was one of the first things I debunked four years ago, yet it's already being recycled. In this case, the poster added audio to the video that didn't exist in the original post I wrote about four years ago.

The video shows two election workers sitting across from each other. One person is reading a ballot, while the other person across from him appears to be filling out a blank ballot. It’s unclear where the audio is from, but the video contains genuine footage from an actual ballot-counting center. 

While it might look suspicious, what it actually shows is two election workers "curing" a ballot. Sometimes voters are asked to cure their own ballots when they submit them without following the proper instructions. Other times, as in this case, this happens when a machine attempts to read a ballot but gets an error — voters will often accidentally mark their ballots in places the machine can’t read or fill their bubbles in sloppily. In this case, the “ballot extractor” part of the machine accidentally damaged the ballot during the count.

As you can see in the video, one election worker is reading the person's original ballot to the other election worker, who then fills out a new ballot exactly the same way for the voter. That ballot is then resubmitted to the machine and cast as a vote. This is 100% normal and legal, and it actually shows election workers making sure every vote is counted accurately.

Also, these people are being recorded. They know they are being recorded. The viral versions of the video claiming fraud are zoomed in on the election workers, so you can’t tell that they are in a room with bipartisan election observers just a few feet away from them (the video shared in 2020 shows this, making it all look much less suspicious). These workers wouldn’t be able to do something so blatantly illegal in a room full of other election workers, election watchers, and cameras without anyone noticing.

Here's another good one I saw this week. In this video, someone calling themselves "Insurrection Barbie" claims to have video evidence of duplicated ballots in Georgia. The video is shared by Peter Bernegger, an account with 45,000 followers who calls himself an "Independent Journalist" and "President of Election Watch, Inc."

In the video, a man is explaining that the two on-screen images are of the same ballot, proving that it was scanned twice in Georgia. The implication is that the ballots were cast multiple times, and that this was proof Democrats were committing fraud.

A few funny things stuck out to me right away.

First: The ballots in question show duplicate votes for Republicans. So, if this video were showing something real, it'd be showing an example of Republican voter fraud — even though it is being shared by a bunch of high-profile conservative accounts claiming Democrats don't want us to see this video. Bernegger, for instance, is using the video to claim that Democrats stole the election, even though this would be an example of fraud benefitting the GOP.

Second: I have a lot of questions. How do we know these images are authentic? Who shared this video initially? Where is it from? I spent an hour trying to find the original poster of the video, and I couldn't do it. That is always suspicious.

Third: Even if we assume every single thing in this video was real, it can still be explained pretty simply. A scanned ballot is not a counted ballot. If you look at the screenshot above, you might notice that a squiggly line is protruding from the bubble next to Jason Shaw's name that a voter clearly tried to fill in. This is exactly the kind of marking that could trigger a machine error, which is why election workers hand-count, cure, or re-scan ballots (as in the first example).

Someone may have submitted this ballot when they voted; the machine may have recorded an error, which meant an election worker had to rescan the ballot later. That doesn't mean the vote got counted twice — it was, in all likelihood, just an attempt at getting the machine to accept the ballot.

Or, perhaps, this was a genuine error! For instance, we know that in 2020, in Fulton County, Georgia, around 3,000 ballots were inadvertently scanned twice — not necessarily counted twice, but scanned twice. This was revealed during an audit and investigation of Fulton County’s election. Trump picked up close to 1,000 additional votes in the hand recount, but it didn't change the outcome of the race. The election count was ultimately conducted three times and underwent several investigations, which you can read more about here.

Anyway, I pointed a lot of this out to Peter Bernegger, and he responded by blocking me on X. That's probably because it’s bad for someone like Peter Bernegger to have someone like me paying attention to him. Peter Bernegger was linking out to a donation page on his profile, so he was making money off of these allegations. Someone explaining to Peter Bernegger’s followers how he is misleading them is bad for business. 

Which is another thing worth noting: Making these claims is a money-making operation — for him and for many others. He is only interested in telling one side of the story. It turns out that none of this is new territory for Bernegger — a quick search turns up stories about him being a convicted fraudster and a menace to election officials in Wisconsin, where he is now facing charges for falsifying a subpoena.

Here’s another good example: Cliff Maloney is a campaign organizer for conservative candidates in Pennsylvania. He claimed on X that one of his canvassers uncovered illegal voters at the Benedictine Sisters of Erie. Apparently, the canvasser saw 53 people registered to vote at the address, went to the building at said address, asked someone at the front desk if anyone lived there, and was told no. Thus, fraud. 

The post caught my attention. Maloney’s post has 2.7 million views as of this writing. It was shared by several prominent conservatives I follow on X. At first glance, this is the kind of story where I'd say "we need more info and let's investigate." Ballot harvesting or vote collecting could reasonably happen in a place like this — quietly, on a small scale, without being noticed. 

There's just one problem, though… a bunch of nuns actually live at the address.

Before I could start digging into it, I found this information from an actual journalist (not a Twitter personality) named Jacqueline Sweet. She looked up the address online and discovered it was a monastery. Then, she found the monastery on Instagram and discovered around 60 nuns were living there. Then, she took the nuns' names mentioned on the Instagram account and matched them to the list of “illegal” voters that Mahoney shared in his video on X. I imagine the entire thing took her about 15 minutes. She even called the monastery and spoke to a woman who shared the names of some of the residents, which also matched the “illegal” voters and those featured on Instagram.

In fact, it turns out the monastery is quite prominent — the nuns are famously liberal and antiwar, and they have been hosting political events. I can only hope the residents, many of whom appear to be in their 80s, 90s or even over 100 years old, are blissfully unaware of this online theory. Oh, and by the way: Maloney, the person behind the claims, has a 501c4 that he is soliciting donations to. 

The examples above are the kinds of direct allegations that can be investigated and fact-checked. But some posts contain what I call "soft claims" — not direct or exact allegations of fraud, but the suggestion that if "X thing" happens, then it's clear the election is stolen. Here is a tweet that was viewed over a million times from the (regrettably named) account "Catturd," which is run by right-wing activist Phillip Buchanan. This account is immensely popular online (with three million followers), and between sarcastic and (sometimes) funny posts, Buchanan often shares messages like this:

As you can see, this post has 1.3 million views and has been retweeted over 20,000 times.

What is frustrating about content like this, though, is not that it is misinformation. It isn't a lie, or even a gross distortion. It is, more than anything else, a totally misleading suggestion couched in a threat of political prosecution.

We know why we might not get election results on Election Day, and it isn't because of evil secretaries of state — it's because many state-level Republicans (in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan) have blocked, delayed, or limited the amount of time that election workers can process or count ballots before Election Day.

This is not a partisan talking point; it is a fact. In Pennsylvania, after the 2020 election, there was widespread agreement that we could not survive another election where days went by without results. So, Democratic members of the state House advanced a bill to start processing mail-in votes before Election Day. This way, they could start counting votes early, ensuring that we’d have results on the night of the election. This is a lot like how it’s done in Florida, a state also run by Republicans but one with a law that allows mail-in ballots to begin being counted 22 days early. This is common sense. 

Under the proposed Pennsylvania bill, election workers would get seven days before Election Day to begin counting mail-in votes — only a third of Florida’s allotted time, but a great improvement over zero. And yet Pennsylvania House Republicans voted unanimously against it, and Republicans in the state senate refused to support it after it passed with only Democratic votes. Republicans wanted any such bill to be paired with voter ID laws; Democrats refused. So Republicans wouldn't pass the bill. Now, critics (like Catturd/Buchanan) are criticizing Democratic secretaries of state, even though Pennsylvania had a measure on the table that could have fixed it — one Republicans refused to vote for.

Of course, you could make the argument that Democrats should have just drafted and passed a voter ID law. I have written about my support for voter ID laws, and I would be happy to see Pennsylvania pass one. But Republicans were the ones who attached their issue to a bipartisan one, and once they knew they weren't going to get a voter ID bill, they still refused to fix a now much bigger problem we’ll all have to deal with on Election Day.

Remember what happened.

It is worth stepping back and recounting what has happened to many of the 2020 election fraud claims.

Remember: On election night, the people claiming fraud began by saying that Democrats had "dropped" ballots in the middle of the night (while we were sleeping). This was always a lie; we knew the night would start with a "red mirage" showing Republicans ahead, because a larger proportion of Democrats were voting by mail (and, again, these states couldn’t start counting these votes until after polls opened). I wrote about this mirage in Tangle weeks before the election. In many states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, those mail-in ballots would be processed, counted, and added to the tally over the course of several days. I was actually awake at 3 a.m. on election night and watched as secretaries of state slowly updated the mail-in vote counts that were being tallied in real time as they were posted to the various state election board websites.

As new outlets explained this admittedly bizarre situation, those claiming the election was stolen pivoted. First, they claimed Dominion voting machines were flipping votes. Then, they claimed Georgia election workers had been caught dropping off suitcases full of fraudulent ballots. Then, they claimed Democrats had used "mules" to stuff ballots across the swing states. The goalposts were always shifting, but the purported end game was mostly the same: The evidence was overwhelming, and the claims would be vindicated in court.

I can't possibly summarize all the research and work I've done over the last four years here, but if you are interested in reading my analysis of many of these claims, you can read this article I wrote for Skeptic Magazine, this thread on X, this piece I published in Tangle, or this story I wrote about the movie “2,000 Mules.”

In sum, these links cover allegations of fraud that were popular on the right as well as allegations that bubbled up on the left in 2016 and 2020. A constant stream of claims came from the right about the counting of votes "stopping" and restarting on election night, Dominion Voting Systems switching votes, statistical anomalies, dead people voting, ballot stuffing, millions of illegal immigrants voting, and Georgia election workers sneaking in ballots. These links also cover claims from the left, beginning with cries of "Russian interference" in 2016, claims 300,000 ballots went missing in 2020, and allegations that Mitch McConnell had stolen his election in 2020.

Throughout the weeks after the election, most of the people pushing these claims (especially on the right) were also fundraising. They were asking for money to pay for lawyers, to challenge results, to support their work uncovering election fraud. The donation requests are a salient aspect of this story, because they supply a plausible motivation for why these people would be pushing lies (if they indeed were doing so knowingly). Trump and the RNC alone raised hundreds of millions of dollars on claims of election fraud — and just $13 million went to filing actual lawsuits. Dinesh D'Souza's movie “2,000 Mules” grossed $10 million in less than two weeks. Even small-time people, like Peter Bernegger, are making thousands of dollars off their claims.

So, what happened when evidence was brought to bear? Contrary to many conservative claims, a lot of these allegations did go to court, and they were not just dismissed on "standing." Many were dismissed on the merits, based on the fact that the people leveling the allegations could not back them up with actual evidence. This was true in both election fraud cases and in defamation lawsuits that popped up when the people making these allegations were sued for falsely accusing election workers or voting systems of committing fraud.

In July of 2022, a group of conservative lawyers, former attorneys general, judges, and Republican senators published a 72-page report on allegations of election fraud. They examined all 64 cases of fraud that Trump and his legal team filed in court, and found that 30 were dismissed that included a hearing on the merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his allies before a hearing, and just 20 were dismissed for lack of standing before a hearing on the merits. One case, involving far too few votes to impact the election, prevailed in Pennsylvania. That case was about voter ID deadlines, not election fraud.

As I wrote in Skeptic Magazine, as of 2022, "22 federal judges appointed by Republican Presidents, including 10 appointed by Trump himself and at least 24 elected or appointed Republican state judges, dismissed the President’s claims. At least 11 lawyers have been referred for disciplinary proceedings due to bad faith and baseless efforts to undermine the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election. Several prominent conservative news outlets and magazines have had to issue retractions."

Here is an incomplete list of some of the consequences that those who pushed these claims have faced since 2020:

• Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle their defamation lawsuit and avoid a trial, marking the largest known defamation settlement in U.S. history. 
• Rudy Giuliani admitted he made public comments falsely accusing Georgia election workers of committing fraud; a jury awarded the workers $148 million in damages, and just this week, a judge decided that he has to literally give them his New York City apartment (among other possessions) to pay the damages.
• While defending herself in court, Sidney Powell said "no reasonable person would conclude" her claims of election fraud “were truly statements of fact.”
• Just a few days ago, The Gateway Pundit admitted there was no election fraud in Atlanta after spending four years claiming there was; it made the admission after it settled an election fraud lawsuit with two Georgia election workers, and consequently had to file for bankruptcy.
• Salem Media Group, the conservative media company behind D'Souza's film “2,000 Mules,” took the film down, apologized, and pledged to remove it from its platforms after law enforcement officials proved it falsely accused people of committing election fraud. 
• Newsmax and One America News Network settled defamation cases with Smartmatic, another voting machine company accused of flipping votes to Biden.
• Tina Peters, a former Mesa County Clerk, was sentenced to nine years in prison for election interference; her actions included giving her security card to a man affiliated with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell so he could illegally access voter data. 

In case it's not obvious, it's worth saying plainly: Dominion, Smartmatic, individual election workers in Georgia, and regular citizens featured in “2,000 Mules” accused of election fraud were able to sue and win or settle these cases because the allegations against them were false. 

Consider this analogy: If a reporter claims on national television that "Isaac Saul stuffed a ballot in Pennsylvania with 100 votes for Republicans" and I sue that person for defamation, a very simple way for that reporter to win the case is to provide evidence that I did, in fact, stuff 100 ballots for Republicans in Pennsylvania. A very good way for them to avoid admitting that they lied is to pay a bunch of money to me so I stop suing them.

Everyone from Fox News to Dinesh D'Souza's production team had to back off these claims not because they were under threat of lawsuit or facing major financial strain, but because they were not able to defend their claims in a court of law.

If there had been evidence, it would have been brought to light. But there wasn't. 

This is, ultimately, the story of 2020: People can make all the outlandish claims they want on social media without repercussions. Those who did it on major television networks were, in many cases, held accountable and punished. Those who went to court were simply unable to substantiate their claims. Yet, as of 2023, more than half of Republicans — including many of my readers and friends — think Biden was not legitimately elected president. I find this incredibly worrisome and frustrating. 

My 10 rules for navigating the internet.

Here is something I've been considering recently: What good is all the experience I've gotten navigating a firehose of nonsense if I don't share any of what I've learned? I am not the arbiter of truth, and I don't want to be.

My ambitious goal — the thing I really want — is to teach you how to identify these things on your own, and hopefully this yields powerful results where you are better informed and more skeptical and can then help others to be, too.

It's worth noting here that this is not easy. Axios recently published an article on America's "gullibility crisis" that I thought was quite good. In it, they noted that in the last few weeks alone, the following things have happened:

“MAGA influencers breathlessly spread the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall, which the X algorithm then promoted in its trending topics as fact. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted a purported screenshot of a headline in The Atlantic that read: ‘To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election.’ It was fake, and Roy deleted the post. Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News 'whistleblower’ that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was ‘fake.’”

A lot of very smart, well qualified people are falling for these misleading stories — sitting members of Congress, venture capitalists, journalists, pundits, and more. It is impossible to avoid them, and it's very hard not to fall for them. So here are some rules I try to follow that have helped me:

1. Always pause and think. If Democrats were organizing a massive election fraud scheme, would they write up contracts and share them electronically for people to sign? If election workers were unloading trash cans full of ballots they forged at an election center, would they dump them out in front of a security camera? If a foreign political leader were organizing illegal election interference, would she post it on Facebook? More often than not, these allegations don't pass a basic sniff test. Pause and think before you share.
2. Follow the money. Most people don't just spread lies for fun. They are doing it for one of two reasons: 1) They are politically motivated, or 2) They are trying to make money. If someone has created a movie that "proves" election fraud happened, but you have to pay $19 to view it, red flags should be going up everywhere. If someone is sharing election fraud claims online and then asking for money to support their investigations, you should consider whether those two things are linked.
3. Ask follow-up questions. If I see someone making a bold claim online, I will ask them to explain it. They’ll often respond with statements like "Democrats are stealing the 2024 election. We all know it." So... ask them how they know it. Once you do, you'll have real evidence to analyze.
4. Find a second source. There are a lot of legitimate-looking news websites that are actually just political organizations masking as news. They exist on the left and right. If you can only find a claim being made by one source, there is a good chance something about it is fishy.
5. Do two minutes of targeted research. If I see someone claim that 100,000 dead voters just cast ballots in Michigan, I'll search "100,000 dead voters Michigan debunked" on Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, or whatever search engine I'm using that day. This is a simple way to stress-test claims: Go looking for the counter-evidence, and then see if someone else has already provided a better explanation.
6. If there is evidence, ignore the commentary. Sometimes, people can convince you something is there that actually isn't. In the example above, an account on X claimed a video proved Democrats were scanning ballots twice in Georgia. But when I looked at the evidence, I noticed that the video actually showed duplicated scans of ballots voting for Republicans. The commentary almost played a trick on my brain, but when I looked at the evidence while ignoring the commentary, I came to a different conclusion.
7. Read the comments and replies. If a claim is being shared on a social media platform or news website, there is often a space for people to reply or comment. The replies and comments usually contain dissenting voices. Read them. For instance, I've noticed that people often add context to videos or photographs in the comments and replies that weren't included in the initial post. I always read the comments and replies for more information. Even though people like Peter Bernegger regularly block dissenting voices, you’ll always find a couple on any popular post.
8. Every state is different. Election laws in Georgia aren't the same as those in Pennsylvania which aren't the same as those in Wisconsin or California or Louisiana and so on. I often see people online claim that something is illegal because they don't understand how election laws differ across states.
9. Consult the experts. I know that’s corny to say, but in this case it's actually still important. Election experts are good sources. Most Americans have never worked as secretaries of state, poll workers, county recorders, auditors, investigators, or in other roles that give them unique insights into how elections are run. When you don't have that experience, you can be convinced that regular, innocuous election activity is actually suspicious or dangerous. It's okay to consult an expert’s opinion when they explain why certain allegations are bunk.
10. Maintain skepticism. More than anything else, rules 1–9 only work if you maintain a modicum of skepticism while navigating the information ecosystem we are operating in. That’s especially important if the information you are encountering reaffirms your world views. So, more than anything else, do your best not to be gullible; don't believe in dramatic or jaw-dropping claims without trying to follow these steps.

Stay cool.

Thanks for reading. I know election season is stressful, especially for people like Tangle readers who are very engaged politically. As Election Day nears, my final bit of advice is to just stay cool: Keep a level head while navigating the dense jungle of our information ecosystem, and remember that we’ll come out alright on the other side of whatever is to come.

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