Now It’s Election Denialism From the Left
Plus: Russian Disinformation Operatives Celebrate Trump Win; Google Search Sparks Election Interference Claims; No, Melania Trump Didn’t Use a Body Double to Vote
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Special Edition: 2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Today:
Look who’s talking: Election fraud claims shift left from right
Look who’s not talking: Russia suddenly halts election disinformation, celebrates Trump win instead
A Google search result sparks false election claims
Unmasking Melania Trump’s “body double”
And more …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson.
BUT FIRST:
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!
1. Fringe Liberals on Social Media Claim Rigged Presidential Election Just as Trump Backers End their Similar Claims
By Coalter Palmer and Sofia Rubinson
What happened: A funny thing happened as the U.S. election results came in on Nov. 5: As it became clear that former President Donald Trump would prevail, liberals began pushing claims of election fraud, similar to claims from the right that had been made before the results were known.
While short on specifics and so far not nearly on the scale as the Trump supporters’ earlier claims, left-leaning social media users claimed that the apparent momentum behind Kamala Harris before the election made it impossible for her to lose, so the only explanation was widespread fraud.
Pro-Harris social media influencer Michelle Baker stated on X: “HARRIS MUST DEMAND A RECOUNT! SHE MUST NOT CONCEDE TO A RIGGED ELECTION! TRUMP MADE IT CLEAR HE WAS GOING TO STEAL IT!” The post had 209,500 views and 23,000 likes in under a day.
There were 30,300 mentions of the hashtag #DoNotConcedeKamala with one of the words “rigged,” “fraud,” or “stolen” on X between 2 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2024, according to a social media analytics tool used by NewsGuard.
Actually: There is no evidence that the 2024 election was rigged for Donald Trump.
In a Nov. 6, 2024, statement, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said, “We have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”
The same day, Harris conceded to Trump. “We must accept the results of this election,” she said.
BlueAnon 2.0? As previously reported in Reality Check, after the attempted assassination attempt on Trump in July 2024, a conspiratorial wing of the left-wing infosphere emerged that some referred to as BlueAnon, a twist on the right-wing QAnon.
Many of the same voices are now claiming that the election was rigged against Harris. Among them:
Liberal X user @LakotaMan1, who previously accused Trump of using fake blood after being shot in the ear, posted on Nov. 6, 2024: “DO NOT CONCEDE KAMALA. DEMAND A RECOUNT. SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT.” The post received 11.8 million views and 283,000 likes.
Progressive advocate Pam Keith, who has garnered millions of views in posts claiming Trump’s assassination attempt was staged, wrote on X: “SOMETHING. IS. NOT. RIGHT. These results are more than just counter-intuitive. They are insane. They don’t align with a single thing we actually saw on the ground.”
NewsGuard sent a direct message to @LakotaMan1 and Pam Keith requesting comment, but did not receive a response. NewsGuard was unable to find contact information for Michelle Baker.
Context: The falsehood that U.S. elections are rigged has been deeply embedded in right-wing circles since the 2020 election. Even on Election Day, conservatives continued to spread false claims about fraud until the results showed a Trump victory. For example, on Nov. 5, 2024, mentions on X of the words “Philadelphia” and “cheating” peaked at 6 p.m. at over 11,600 posts in one hour. (At 4:40 p.m. on Election Day, Trump baselessly claimed on Truth Social that there was “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia.”)
However, such mentions decreased to less than 100 posts per hour by 3 a.m., when the conspiracy-orientated social media users from the left picked up the misinformation baton, although not at the scale of the earlier right-wing efforts.
“You could call it a role-reversal,” said NewsGuard political editor Sam Howard, who oversaw NewsGuard’s election night misinformation coverage. “As Trump's win became more apparent, there were fewer fraud claims from the right. But now there is a disbelief on the left that Harris' defeat was legitimate. It was inescapable on X the day after Election Day.”
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2. Russian Disinformation Operators Congratulate Themselves on Trump Victory
By Eva Maitland and McKenzie Sadeghi
Deepfakes. AI videos. Fake local news outlets. Sham investigations. Staged footage. These were the hallmarks of Russian disinformation narratives in the months leading up to the 2024 election. But it appears these election efforts are over, other than the celebrations.
What happened: In the days leading up to Nov. 5, Russian media launched multiple false claims, including a fake video purporting to show Trump ballots being ripped up in Pennsylvania and Haitian migrants illegally voting in Georgia. However, as it became clear that Trump was winning, Kremlin propagandists shifted from disinformation campaigns to celebrating the outcome.
Context: Russian disinformation campaigns, personified through the work of former Florida deputy sheriff turned fugitive and Russian operative John Mark Dougan, targeted the Harris campaign with false narratives — ranging from accusations that Kamala Harris was a cocaine addict to claims that Tim Walz sexually abused students when he was a high school teacher.
Switching the narrative: When Trump was declared the victor, Russian state actors were no longer pumping out election-focused disinformation campaigns, and instead praised the results.
Dougan shared a video of himself on the snowy streets of Moscow stating, “Trump has just won again so let’s announce it to Russia because they don't know it here yet … TRUMP WON!” (Just one day earlier, Dougan said that the 2020 election was stolen and that “it’s going to happen again.”) For NewsGuard’s full catalog of Dougan’s multi-media efforts click here.
Tara Reade, who relocated to Moscow after accusing Joe Biden of sexual assault and who regularly advances Russian disinformation, said on X: “I am so proud of my fellow Americans today. You listened … and voted the corruption out. I never got justice re Biden, but now perhaps there will be peace.”
Pro-Kremlin activist Simeon Boikov, who goes by “AussieCossack” and regularly shares Russian disinformation, said in a Telegram post that he was proud that he “literally helped Trump and Elon get elected into office.”
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: Haitian migrants are illegally voting in Georgia’s Gwinnett and Fulton counties
MYTH: Kentucky voting machines do not allow voters to select Donald Trump’s name
MYTH: Kamala Harris and her husband paid $500,000 for warning Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs about a police raid
MYTH: A former aide to Arizona’s Secretary of State said state leaders plan to rig the 2024 U.S. election
MYTH: Days before Election Day 2024, CNN aired a graphic showing Kamala Harris leading in Texas by six percentage points
MYTH: Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign paid Beyoncé $10 million to appear at a Houston rally
MYTH: Fox News published a photograph of graffiti of Volodymyr Zelensky begging for votes from Kamala Harris
MYTH: A Russian foundation’s investigation proved Democrats have a plan to rig the 2024 U.S. election
MYTH: Michael Jordan endorsed Donald Trump in 2024
MYTH: An image shows 2024 ballots cast for Donald Trump in North Carolina, about to be thrown away by a U.S. Postal Service worker
MYTH: A California power company said it might cut power to more than 7,000 polling locations on Election Day 2024
MYTH: Atlanta-area counties illegally accepted mail-in ballots in November 2024
MYTH: 2024 Kentucky ballots carry a dot that invalidates all votes cast for a presidential candidate other than Kamala Harris
MYTH: Melania Trump was replaced with a body double on Election Day 2024
MYTH: U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin said ‘we won’t be certifying the election’ if Donald Trump wins in 2024
MYTH: A gas leak at a Michigan polling station was caused by Democrats to steal the election
MYTH: A Georgia sheriff’s office said the Ku Klux Klan plans to attack Black voters after Election Day 2024
3. Google This: Conservatives, Russian Media Falsely Accuse the Tech Giant of Favoring Harris
What happened: Conservative social media users and Russian state media are falsely claiming that a Google search result on Election Day proved the tech giant interfered with the 2024 U.S. presidential election on Harris’ behalf.
A closer look: Proponents of this narrative shared a video showing a side-by-side comparison of two Google search results: one displayed a list of polling locations in response to the query “Where can I vote for Harris,” while a search for “Where can I vote for Trump” provided no polling location information.
You can watch the video here:
Users claimed that the search results proved that Google rigged the election in favor of Democrats.
Conservative X user @LibsofTikTok said: “Google will help you find a polling location when asked where to vote for Harris but not when asked where to vote for Trump. Election Interference!” The post generated 727,000 views and 7,000 likes in one day.
Russian state media RT.com (NewsGuard Trust Score: 20/100) published an article titled “Google admits voting feature favored Harris over Trump,” with the subheading, “The tech giant failed to provide voters with data on where to vote for the Republican.”
Actually: This variation in search results does not prove that Google is “rigging” the election. There’s a much more innocent, techy explanation.
Google explained in a Nov. 5, 2024, statement that its algorithm interprets searches beginning with “where” to be looking for geographic locations. Harris is both the name of a candidate and a county, which confused the algorithm.
Google clarified that the phrase “Where to vote for Harris” was interpreted by the algorithm to mean “Where to vote in Harris County, Texas.” The query produced a list of polling locations in that county. Trump’s name did not yield the same result because his name is not also the name of a geographic location. A similar search for “Vance” led to search results for Vance County, North Carolina, because the county has the same name as J.D. Vance, according to Google’s statement.
Google added that it was working on tweaking its algorithm so that the search engine can better distinguish candidate names and place names. “Note very few people actually search for voting places this way,” Google said, explaining that most users do not search for polling locations by candidate, as all polling places serve all candidates equally.
All polling locations in the United States had both Harris and Trump on the ballot.
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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 … Seeing Double: Liberals Falsely Claim Melania Trump ‘Body Double’ Voted on Election Day
What happened: Liberal social media users are spreading the false claim that a “body double” for former first lady Melania Trump voted with president-elect Donald Trump on Nov. 5, 2024, citing as evidence the fact that she wore sunglasses indoors and resembles a Trump communications aide.
A closer look: “Yo, am I crazy, or is that a fake Melania standing next to him?” liberal X user @mmpadellan posted on Nov. 5, 2024, alongside a video taken of Melania Trump after she cast a ballot with her husband. The post garnered 9.7 million views and 88,000 likes in seven hours.
The same day, liberal X user @JMeanypants posted a still image of Melania Trump from the event next to previous photos of the former first lady. “Whoever was at the polls today with Don, WASN’T MELANIA. I guess the check bounced,” stated the post, which received 350,000 views and 12,000 likes in seven hours.
Actually: Other images from the same appearance show that the woman was, in fact, Melania Trump.
A photo of Donald and Melania Trump taken by Getty Images photographer Chip Somodevilla after they voted captures the former first lady without sunglasses, clearly showing her facial features.
The outfit that Melania Trump wore to cast a ballot was a black polka-dot Dior dress that she has worn previously during a September 2024 Fox News interview, according to NBC New York (Trust Score: 82.5/100).
Some social media users shared the video of Melania Trump in sunglasses next to an image of Trump’s deputy communications chief Margo Martin in what appears to be the same dress, claiming that Martin was the “body double.”
The full image of Martin, published in a May 2024 article by Daily Mail (Trust Score: 69.5/100), shows that she is wearing a similar but different dress that has longer sleeves and a different neckline.
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: An Oct. 26, 2024, video taken at a Pittsburgh-area polling place does not show a group of ineligible voters skipping a long line to cast ballots, according to local election officials.
The brief video shared widely on social media shows a group of about a dozen people walking to the front of a line of voters outside one of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s, early voting locations in 2024. Elderly and disabled voters in this group were allowed to enter the polling place and sit down, an accommodation granted to all elderly or disabled voters in Allegheny County. Allegheny County disputed claims that these were ineligible voters, stating in a news release that “any individual who requested a mail-in ballot this past weekend only would have been given a ballot if they were already registered. Only U.S. Citizens may register to vote.”
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