A voter hands his ballot to an election judge at a ballot drop-off location in Denver on June 28, 2022. State election authorities accidentally sent voter registration information to 30,000 non-citizens who are not eligible to vote, which has fed conspiracy theories about the upcoming midterms.
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A voter hands his ballot to an election judge at a ballot drop-off location in Denver on June 28, 2022. State election authorities accidentally sent voter registration information to 30,000 non-citizens who are not eligible to vote, which has fed conspiracy theories about the upcoming midterms.
Marc Piscotty/Getty Images
A clerical error by Colorado election officials weeks before the November election has taken a conspiratorial turn, researchers have found via Twitter data.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s office, which oversees the state’s elections, accidentally sent about 30,000 postcards to noncitizens who were ineligible to vote that contained instructions on how to register. At least some of the people who received the postcards live in the country without authorization.
Materials sent by the Secretary of State’s office say only US citizens are eligible to vote, and the office says there are safeguards in place to prevent non-citizens from registering and casting a ballot. Colorado Public Radio first reported the error on Oct. 7, and an NPR Twitter account retweeted the story the same day.
Social media engagement with the story remained flat over the weekend, according to Twitter data collected by the University of Washington and Stanford University’s Election Integrity Partnership, which monitors social media discourse around the election.
But tweets casting doubt on whether the posts were really an accident began almost immediately, says Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
The online focus on wrongdoing comes as Republicans allied with former President Donald Trump have used disaffected conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election, intimidate election workers and make repeated false claims that Democrats are registering people living in the country illegally to move. elections in their favor.
Sunday, a conservative social media personality with about 20,000 followers posted on Twitter, “Colorado accidentally sent voter registration notices to 30,000 non-citizens” without further comment, an accurate statement. Many of the replies to that tweet put quotation marks around the word “accidentally”, or said things like “Riiiiight”.
“As it accelerates and explodes to larger audiences, you start to see clearer claims—that they go beyond the wink, wink, push, push kind of stuff that seemed to dominate in the beginning.” says Caufield.
On Monday, Red State, a conservative website with nearly 300,000 Twitter followers, included the telling quotation mark in its headline of the story about the error. In the story, the writer claimed the error suggested the incident raised much larger issues with Colorado’s voter registration system.
Hours later, the story gained further momentum online when the Associated Press published its own story about the error and conservative media personalities rehashed it.
By Tuesday, five days after the first story was published, Trump posted a story about the conservative Daily Wire’s error on his social media platform, Truth Social. That story also used a headline with quotes around the word “accidental” even though the overall story included a quote stating that policies are in place “to make sure mistakes don’t result in disasters.”
As of Thursday, the story of faulty voter registration cards continues to grow on Twitter, data from the Partnership for Election Integrity shows.
An administrative error involving an election, while innocuous, “is often a kind of kernel of truth around which grows the broader, more expansive and often false claim,” Caulfield says.
“We have over 3,000 counties in the U.S. … as far as just a numbers game, you’re going to see mistakes made [in election administration]”Thankfully most of those mistakes that develop will be low impact because we’ve come up with systems and processes and controls and, you know, measures to mitigate it.”
In a statement, Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold said her office recognized the incident was likely to become a fodder for actors eager to cast doubt on the election. “We have prioritized communicating with Coloradans quickly and transparently about the situation,” she said.
Asking questions about the election process is healthy, Caulfield says, but context is vital.
“When people start speculating and theorizing in this space without, you know, background information, without the injection of expertise, without all these things that can make those conversations more productive,” he says. “Too often things go off the rails.”
