Judicial Watch falsely claimed several Iowa counties had more voters on their rolls than were eligible to vote

A conservative not-for-profit organization and several prominent rightwing media figures spread false and misleading information about Iowa’s voter rolls in the hours leading up to the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus on Monday.

Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation based in Washington DC, issued a press release Monday falsely claiming that eight counties in Iowa had more voters on their registration rolls than were eligible to vote.

“My office has told this organization, and others who have made similar claims, that their data regarding Iowa is deeply flawed and their false claims erode voter confidence in elections,” the Iowa secretary of state, Paul Pate, said in a statement. “They should stop this misinformation campaign immediately and quit trying to disenfranchise Iowa voters.”

Why Instagram could be a major site for disinformation in the 2020 US election | Paul M Barrett Read more

Despite the rapid pushback from Pate, a Republican, the false narrative spread quickly on social media, with a boost from the conservative media figures Sean Hannity and Charlie Kirk.

The Judicial Watch press release was shared approximately 12,000 times on Facebook, and write-ups of the release were also posted by the Facebook pages of Sean Hannity, the rightwing blog the Gateway Pundit, and several radio stations owned by iHeartMedia. An Epoch Times article based on the report was shared more than 23,000 times on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle data. The Epoch Times is a pro-Trump publication that was banned from advertising on Facebook following an NBC News investigation into its ad spending.

The narrative was also spread on Twitter by Hannity and Kirk, founder of the rightwing campus organization Turning Point USA.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, explained that Judicial Watch’s results were inaccurate because the group counted voters listed both as “active” and “inactive” on the rolls. Inactive voters are those a state believes have moved away, he explained, but who are kept on the rolls due to federal law.

“Adding inactive voters is like taking the student population of a college and adding the alumni population, then saying that is the number of people who are going to take classes this semester,” he explained. “It’s not like this is a simple mathematical error. They’ve been repeatedly told that their methodology is wrong.”

In a news release on Monday evening, Judicial Watch said it stood by its analysis.

Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) On the right –> tweets by Sean Hannity and Charlie Kirk spreading false information about Iowa voter rolls.



On the left -> a tweet by the Iowa Secretary of State correcting the disinformation



Disinformation travels farther, faster. Visualization via Hoaxy pic.twitter.com/X1rljxwn7t

The spread of the disinformation provided an early test for social media companies, which are under significant pressure to address misinformation and voter suppression better in 2020 than they did in 2016.

Twitter and Facebook declined to remove posts spreading the disinformation because they said the posts were not specifically designed to suppress the vote or mislead people about how to vote. A spokesman for Facebook initially said that the Judicial Watch post had been “enqueued” for its third-party fact checkers. Facebook reduces the distribution of posts marked as false by Facebook’s factchecking partners, though this process takes time. The company later said the post was factchecked false and had been given a more prominent “false information/checked by independent factcheckers” label.

Becker said it was very unlikely that false reports about the voter rolls would suppress the vote in Iowa, especially since the state’s caucus system already draws only the most committed voters. However, he said that the longterm impact of false narratives like this was very real – and very troubling.

“The impact is exactly what our enemies in the Kremlin want,” he said. “They want us to doubt that our elections are fair. They want us to doubt the outcomes of elections.”

“Spreading rumors like this has an insidious effect,” he added. “They want us to lose faith in democracy.”