False Voting Claims Soar as Election Day Nears
PLUS: Our Co-CEO Explains How NewsGuard Became a “Brand Victim of the Week”; No, Trump Did Not Use an Incontinence Pad on Fox News
Welcome to Reality Check, your inside look at how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
Today:
The final stretch: Election misinformation goes into overdrive
NewsGuard is embarrassed: This week’s “brand victims” include … us!
Viral satire sparks false claims about Trump and incontinence pad
And more …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Jack Brewster, Eric Effron, and Sofia Rubinson.
1. As Early Voting Begins, Claims of Election Fraud Soar
By Chiara Vercellone, Sam Howard, and Coalter Palmer
Early voting means early claims of voter fraud …
What happened: With just over a week until Election Day on Nov. 5, conservative social media users are citing false evidence of fraud in early voting procedures across several battleground states.
The effort seems aimed at sowing distrust in the election results before the votes are counted.
Michigan: Pro-Trump accounts are claiming that Detroit’s high absentee-ballot return rate is proof of voter fraud.
“They are stealing Michigan already,” conservative X account @hodgetwins said in a reply to a post that showed Detroit’s higher absentee-ballot return rate compared to other Michigan cities. The reply garnered 550,000 views.
It is true that 40 percent of absentee ballots sent to Detroit voters were returned as of mid-October 2024, a rate 14 percentage points higher than at the same time four years ago. However, the increase reflects changes in Detroit’s voting infrastructure and processes, not fraud, authorities said.
For example, since 2020, Detroit implemented a new mailed-ballot processing system called Relia-Vote, which allows the city to more efficiently send out, scan, and sort absentee ballots.
Also, a state constitutional amendment enacted in 2022 established a permanent mail-in voting list, which has resulted in ballots getting to voters earlier than in past elections, Michigan Secretary of State spokesperson Angela Benander told NewsGuard.
Detroit’s absentee-ballot return rate, while higher than those in most municipalities and counties in Michigan, was not an anomaly. The city of East Jordan and Bay County — both of which Donald Trump won handily in 2020 — had similar return rates.
Georgia: Conservatives are falsely claiming that election machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems in Whitfield County, Georgia, are switching votes cast for Donald Trump to Kamala Harris.
“CHECK YOUR BALLOTS GEORGIA! Reports from Whitfield County, GA that Dominion machines are flipping votes. This is exactly the kind of fraud we saw in 2020 and it cannot be tolerated,” stated Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose district includes Whitfield County, in an Oct. 18, 2024, X post with 3.4 million views.
There is no evidence that Dominion Voting machines are switching votes in Whitfield County, Georgia, or anywhere else.
The machines were tested by Whitfield County election officials in August 2024 and were found to be working properly ahead of the Nov. 5, 2024, election, local newspaper the Dalton Daily Citizen (NewsGuard Trust Score: 80/100) reported at the time.
The claim stems from an incident in Georgia in which a single voter claimed the printed, filled-out ballot she received after voting did not reflect her actual vote.
Greene stated the vote was cast for Trump, although there is no evidence that the Whitfield County voter intended to vote Republican. Election officials said the voter had simply made an error in her selection, which was corrected, and that no fraud was involved.
Texas: Similarly, pro-Trump users alleging widespread fraud are citing testimony of a voter in Tarrant County, Texas, who said in a video posted on X that his vote was switched from one candidate to another. The man did not say how he voted.
“BREAKING: Voters in Tarrant County, Texas are reporting that the voting machines are flipping their votes from Trump to Kamala Harris … This sets a precedent for us to demand the publicizing of all the machine data and the proprietary software. It’s a good thing we are catching it before the election and NOT after,” conservative X account @BehizyTweets posted, receiving 8.8 million views.
In fact, local election officials suggested that voter error was responsible for the confusion and said that the county’s voting system is not switching votes.
Helen Bundschu, a Republican serving as an election judge for the polling location where the man in the video said he voted, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Trust Score: 100/100) that she had not seen evidence of election machines switching votes. The newspaper added, “She said people can pick the wrong candidate if they’re not careful.”
2024 U.S. Election Misinformation Monitoring Center
Our team of analysts is keeping you up to date as we cover misinformation surrounding this year’s U.S. presidential election. See below for the latest misinformation claims we’ve identified, and visit NewsGuard’s 2024 U.S. Election Misinformation Monitoring Center for detailed debunks of each claim.
MYTH: McDonald’s confirmed in a statement that Kamala Harris never worked for the company
MYTH: A high absentee-ballot return rate in Detroit in mid-October 2024 is evidence of voter fraud
MYTH: Ron DeSantis said Dominion Voting Systems will not operate in Florida
MYTH: The Atlantic published an article headlined ‘Trump is Literally Hitler’
MYTH: Donald Trump promised to buy McDonald’s meals for others in October 2024 but left without paying
MYTH: Oregon’s Democratic secretary of state removed Republicans Donald Trump and JD Vance from the Online Voters’ Guide on her office’s website
Misinformation Quiz: Want to see how well you can distinguish fact from fiction? Select whether you think this narrative is real or fake to test your misinformation spotting skills. Scroll to the bottom to see if you were correct with NewsGuard’s fact check!
2. Brand Victims of the Week: NewsGuard!
(Plus Adobe, Ulta, Stanford Court Hotel, GameStop, Macy’s, T-Mobile, Capital One Shopping, Adidas, Under Armour, Porter Airlines, Baylor University, Subway, Meliá Hotels, and Samsung.)
NewsGuard, Adobe, Macy’s, T-Mobile, Capital One Shopping, Adidas and others fund a website that spreads false claims.
In this Reality Check feature, NewsGuard identifies global brands that inadvertently support the spread of misinformation by funneling programmatic advertising dollars to sites that repeatedly peddle false claims. Unless advertisers use inclusion or exclusion lists, their ads appear on websites regardless of their trustworthiness.
This week: A NewsGuard analyst based in the U.S. was shown programmatic ads for Adobe, Ulta, Stanford Court Hotel, Gamestop, Macy’s, T-Mobile, Capital One Shopping, Adidas, Under Armour, Porter Airlines, Baylor University, Subway, Meliá Hotels, Samsung — and NewsGuard — on the ConservativeRoof.com website. The site has a NewsGuard Trust Score of 0/100 and has run false claims about COVID-19 vaccines and U.S. elections.
A representative for Porter Airlines told NewsGuard in an October 2024 email: “We didn't purchase directly from the site, so we'll take a closer review on the backend.” Representatives for Adobe, Ulta, Stanford Court Hotel, GameStop, Macy’s, T-Mobile, Capital One Shopping, Adidas, Under Armour, Baylor University, Subway, Meliá Hotels, and Samsung did not immediately respond to NewsGuard’s emailed requests for comment.
NewsGuard did respond, with the Commentary that follows.
(Disclosure: NewsGuard is among the companies that license data that would help advertisers only advertise on reliable, brand suitable news sites.)
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3. Commentary: How NewsGuard Became a 62 Cents “Brand Victim of the Week”
Our ad for Reality Check appeared on a misinformation website. We failed to use our own brand-safety tools.
By NewsGuard Co-CEO Gordon Crovitz
“You’d think we would have thought of this,” said one NewsGuard co-CEO to the other, who — equally sheepish — agreed. One of our analysts had just alerted us to a programmatic ad for Reality Check on conspiracy website Conservative Roof that gets a 0/100 Trust Score from NewsGuard. Our policy, like that of many other brands, is to avoid financially supporting misinformation websites with our advertising revenue, whether they’re Russian disinformation, healthcare hoax sites, or conspiracy sites on the right or left. Ads have been proven not to get good responses on sites whose content is false or egregiously misleading, and an ad there can be embarrassing to the brand and offensive to its prospective customers.
Besides, who wants to help finance falsehoods?
But there it was: An ad promoting Reality Check on Conservative Roof, which is one of the less than two percent of the more than 10,000 websites we’ve rated that fails all nine of our criteria. It regularly publishes false content, such as that the more often people get a COVID-19 booster vaccine the higher the risk of contracting the virus. It also doesn’t disclose its ownership or information about its staff, among other failings.
This ad was placed by Google, which runs the largest “demand-side platform” delivering ads to sites — including what NewsGuard analysts have found to include thousands of misinformation sites. This ad by itself only delivered 62 cents to the website. Many brands shrug when they see their ads on sites like this, figuring their ad spending on them could be modest. The problem is that these unintentional placements add up: Brands unintentionally advertising on misinformation sites send $2.6 billion a year to misinformation sites, much of it coming via the Google demand side platform, which takes a cut of each dollar spent. Misinformation is a good business.
How did our ad end up on this website? When we launched a test for an ad campaign to broaden awareness of this newsletter, we neglected to add protection — protection that we license to other advertisers and ad-tech companies — against the programmatic advertising system that delivers ads to misinformation sites unless brands take steps to protect themselves. Adding insult to self-injury, we’re a leader in the trust industry in solving this problem for brands with exclusion lists (don’t advertise on these misinformation sites) and inclusion lists (only advertise on these high-trust sites). But we forgot to tell the marketing firm running our test to use our protections.
As a result, Google delivered the ad to this site because its algorithm calculated this was a cheap place to run the ad, regardless of the quality of the site. A study by the ANA in December found that the average ad campaign now runs ads on more than 40,000 random websites if brands fail to limit the ads to quality sites.
Our “Penance Offer”: We’ve now added our exclusion list to our ad purchases for promoting Reality Check. However, as penance, we’d like to make this offer to the other brands whose ads we’ve seen running on this 0/100 website: We will provide our exclusion or inclusion list for free to these brands for the rest of this year. If you represent one of the other “Brand Victims of the Week,” just let me know at realitycheck@newsguardtech.com.
If you know any chief marketing officers or others in charge of ad campaigns, please pass along this tale of NewsGuard failing to use our own tools. It’s embarrassing to us, but a good reminder how brands can do well by protecting themselves and do good by reducing the financial incentive for misinformation.
Gordon Crovitz is the Co-CEO and Co-Editor-In-Chief of NewsGuard. Previously, he was publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
If you see something, say something
If you see or hear something that you think may be provably false, please alert NewsGuard via realitycheck@newsguardtech.com and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of it. Note: Tips should not include content that you simply disagree with, however strongly.
4. One More Thing … Padding the Truth: No, Fox News Did Not Make Trump Sit On an ‘Incontinence Towel’
What happened: Liberal social media users are claiming that former President Donald Trump sat on a towel or incontinence pad during an Oct. 18, 2024, interview on the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends.”
In fact, what appears to be a towel is just fabric from Trump’s oversized suit jacket, as shown in the full video of the interview.
A closer look: “I love how Fox had the foresight to lay a black towel on the white couch just in case Trump s--- himself during the interview,” liberal X user @CoffeyTimeNews stated on Oct. 18, 2024, garnering 3.8 million views and 43,000 likes in four days.
Ben Meiselas, co-founder of the progressive MeidasTouch Network, posted a zoomed-in photo of Trump on the couch alongside a photo of a washable incontinence bed pad from Amazon. The post received 3.7 million views and 36,000 likes in four days.
Actually: It’s just satire.
This false claim appears to have started with a post labeled as satire in the Reddit channel r/PoliticalHumor by user LurkmasterGeneral, three hours after the segment aired on Fox News. The post featured a photo of the broadcast showing Trump, who appeared to be sitting on a towel, accompanied by the caption: “Donold [sic] Trump sitting on an absorbent pad to protect the couch during Fox interview.”
In the full video of the interview available on Fox News’s website, Trump is seen walking toward the “Fox & Friends” couch wearing a navy blue suit jacket that extends below his waist. As he sits down, the jacket fabric bunches beneath him. The video also confirms that the couch was bare before he sat down.
Context: As NewsGuard has previously reported, many false claims are emerging from satirical posts. In July 2024, another couch-related false narrative involving Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, began as a parody.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
Misinformation Quiz Answer: Misinformation!
Debunk: Minnesota does not disclose a voter’s party affiliation on the outside of absentee ballot envelopes, contrary to claims made by conservative social media users citing a photo of an envelope with an “R” marked on the front. The “R” does not stand for Republican and instead indicates that the absentee ballot materials are for a registered voter. Voters in Minnesota do not declare a party when registering to vote.
Fake Local News Sites Tracker: 1,283 Sites and Counting
In June 2024, NewsGuard reported that so-called pink slime websites — sites posing as independent news outlets but secretly funded by partisan groups — now outnumber daily newspapers in the U.S. Below, we track the spread of pink slime websites, as compared to Northwestern Local News Initiative’s count of daily newspapers. (Northwestern’s tracker was last updated in October 2024. Its updated tracker reduced the number of remaining daily newspapers to 1,033 from last year’s 1,213.)
Reality Check is produced by Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
We launched Reality Check after seeing how much interest there is in our work beyond the business and tech communities that we serve. Subscribe to this newsletter to support our apolitical mission to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Have feedback? Send us an email: realitycheck@newsguardtech.com.