Election Day is supposed to be democracy’s finest hour—a moment when ordinary people, from every corner of the country, come together to make their voices heard. But it’s also something else: the Super Bowl for misinformation on the internet. With tens of millions of Americans casting ballots at tens of thousands of polling places across the continental United States and beyond, the sheer scale of the operation creates a perfect breeding ground for confusion, conspiracy theories, and viral chaos. Think about it: on a normal Tuesday, a small problem at a single polling place might go unnoticed. But on Election Day, that same minor hiccup can be filmed, posted, shared, twisted, and amplified into a national scandal within minutes. The machinery of democracy is enormous, and it is run by human beings—people who get tired, make mistakes, and sometimes just have bad days. That humanity is part of what makes elections meaningful, but it also makes them vulnerable to misunderstanding. And in our hyper-polarized, hyper-online world, any Election Day snafu has the potential to spiral into a storm of speculation, with millions of people watching and waiting for something to go wrong. The truth is more mundane: elections are complicated, and complications are normal. But the gap between what actually happens and what people believe happens has never been wider, and that gap is where misinformation thrives.
Elections are run by humans who rely on machines, from simple printers to sophisticated voting technology designed to protect the integrity of the vote. And humans, like machines, can sometimes make mistakes. Printers jam. A fuse blows and the power goes out. A poll worker doesn’t have the right key to open the polling location. These mishaps happen far more often than you might think, and they are almost always the result of ordinary, boring problems—not malicious schemes. Election workers have contingency plans for just about every scenario, and their goal is simple: to ensure that no one is disenfranchised. If a polling location opens late because someone forgot a key, a judge can extend the hours beyond the regular closing time. If a voting machine breaks down, election workers can have voters place their ballots into a secure ballot box, where they will be protected and processed later. These systems are designed to be resilient, to absorb mistakes and keep the democratic process moving forward. But the existence of these safeguards doesn’t stop the internet from jumping to conclusions. In a world where everything is political, a jammed printer is never just a jammed printer. It becomes evidence of a plot, proof of corruption, or a sign that the system is rigged. The reality is far less dramatic: minor mishaps will almost certainly happen on Election Day, but they are not automatic proof of malice. They are just part of the messy, human business of running an election. The challenge is remembering that when social media is screaming at you to see the worst in everything.
Further complicating matters, elections are run locally, not federally. There is no single national election system, no uniform set of rules that apply everywhere. Depending on where you vote—whether it’s a state, a city, a township, or tribal land—the rules, processes, voting machines, and contingency plans can be completely different. This decentralized approach is intentional, and it’s designed to keep the vote secure and maintain election integrity. But it also means that when voters encounter a process that looks unfamiliar, it can easily be framed as suspicious. A ballot that looks different from the one your cousin in another state posted online. A voting machine that operates in a way you’ve never seen before. A counting process that seems slower than expected. In the maelstrom of social media, anything unfamiliar is often treated as evidence that something untoward is afoot. We’ve become conditioned to assume the worst, to see shadows where there are only logistical realities. Having spent the past five federal election cycles tracking the spread of misinformation, I can tell you that this pattern repeats itself again and again. The unfamiliar becomes the suspicious, and the suspicious becomes the viral. But the truth is that election officials across the country are working hard to run fair, secure elections, and they are doing so under an unprecedented amount of scrutiny. Every decision they make, every machine they use, every process they follow is being watched, filmed, and dissected by people who are looking for problems, not solutions.
There are almost always some issues somewhere at the start of polling day. Voters who show up early to cast their ballots might post on social media about their frustration with whatever problem they’re experiencing. These posts are understandable, and they are not ill-intentioned. But they often get picked up by algorithms and by people who are actively seeking to question the integrity of the electoral process. Before the voter even knows what’s happened, their early morning complaint has ricocheted across the internet, been viewed millions of times, and been woven into whatever narrative interested parties are trying to portray. During the last midterm elections in 2022, an issue with printers cropped up at some polling locations in Maricopa County, Arizona. Officials quickly implemented a contingency plan, and people were able to securely cast their votes. A Maricopa judge who was asked to adjudicate the issue later that day said there was no evidence that anyone who wanted to vote was not able to. And yet, prominent election deniers on social media spent hours pointing to the issue as a sign of a grand conspiracy to steal the election. This is a classic of the genre. As sure as you can count on a news anchor standing at a glowing map on election night, you can be sure that someone will post a video on Election Day claiming to show a machine changing their vote. This issue often occurs due to human error, or sometimes because of an issue with older touchscreen technology used in some voting machines. If this does happen, voters can almost always talk to an election worker, and there is usually a process in place to ensure their vote is cast correctly. But it’s worth asking, when you see these videos circulating, whether the person who posted it actually sought to remedy the issue in person with election staff at the polling location—or whether they are primarily motivated by chasing social media views.
Artificial intelligence is permeating every aspect of our lives, from kids using it to do their homework to video tools that can make it look like your grandfather is dancing the Macarena. Given its ubiquity, it may be hard to believe that just a couple of years ago, creating convincing fake videos took considerable effort and skill. On Election Day 2020, a video of a ballot marked for President Trump being set on fire spread across social media, and it was even shared by the president’s son Eric. In 2024, a video purporting to show an election worker tearing up ballots also went viral. Both videos were confirmed to be fake, and it turned out that Russian operatives were behind the 2024 video. The people who made the fakes had to go to some effort, at least, to print out fake ballots to try to make the videos convincing. But new research from the nonpartisan Brennan Center shows how videos and images convincingly purporting to show some kind of electoral malfeasance can now be created with the click of a button using AI chat tools available to all of us. This changes the game entirely. You don’t need a sophisticated operation or a team of specialists anymore. You just need an internet connection and a willingness to deceive. So be prepared for a lot of fake videos this Tuesday. If you see something outrageous, pause before you share it. Ask yourself whether it looks too perfect, too convenient, too designed to provoke an emotional reaction. The goal of these videos is not to inform you—it’s to make you doubt, to make you angry, to make you lose faith in the system. Don’t let them win.
Once the polls close, attention will turn to the count, and this is where the patience of the American public is often tested. Different states count their votes in different ways, and some states are slower than others. In 2020, that difference in pace was the source of endless conspiracy theories that persist to this day. In some states, the Democratic Party often makes significant gains through mail-in ballots that get counted after Election Day. This might mean a candidate who appears ahead in the early stage of the count might fall behind when all the votes are tallied. Likewise, results arriving from heavily red or heavily blue districts might suddenly change who is leading the count. All of this is overseen by experts, by representatives from both parties who observe vote counts, and it is explained at length by election experts. But still, the conspiracy theories persist. The tsunami of misinformation can be overwhelming, and on Tuesday, the zone will very likely be flooded with endless accounts of alleged voter fraud, many of them amplified by powerful figures. American elections are not perfect—no system is. But it’s important to remember on this Election Day that there are thousands of devoted election officials working across the country to ensure the election is safe and secure. There is also a committed industry of election deniers, motivated by politics or money or both, devoted to telling you otherwise. They will seek to flood the zone, to create the impression that there is a lot of smoke, in the hope that you might believe there is a fire. But smoke is not fire. It’s just the exhaust of a noisy, messy, human democracy doing its best. And that is something worth protecting, worth believing in, and worth showing up for.