A stew of lies: lessons from the US election and five steps local government must take to fight misinformation

As US voters go to the polls, local election administrators are having to fight mistruths cooked up to cause chaos. LGIU’s Ingrid Koehler assesses the impact and creates a recipe for combatting misinformation.

You may have heard that immigrants are eating cats in Ohio. Is it true? No. In general, there’s not a lot of good eating on a cat and obligate carnivore meat usually doesn’t taste very good (I’m told).

But it’s part of an old trope. ‘Those people’ from ‘over there’ eat things that are not just disgusting, but morally wrong. It’s almost like they’re not even human at all. From harmful rumours about East Asian restaurants, to slurs based on Spanish-speaking America’s fondness for beans, to the blood libel, ethno-nationalists have played into “They are the disgusting thing they eat,”.  It causes significant harm, even though, in general, it’s not true. (Although Latin American legume cuisine is genuinely amazing, tasty and healthy. We should all be bean-eaters.)

Thankfully journalists have been fact-checking. A check-in with Springfield, Ohio’s City Manager (equivalent to a chief executive or chief operating officer in an executive mayor governance model) revealed that the stories were not true. Digging further into the origin of this instance of the urban myth, there was a social media post of a woman suspecting her Haitian neighbours of eating her cat. Miss Sassy (for the avoidance of doubt, the cat) was found soon after, alive and well, hiding out in the basement of her own house.

But the flames had been fanned and the Republican candidates are continued to spread these lies even after they’ve been debunked again and again. The local Republican mayor, Ron Rue, walked a fine line between calming troubled waters and keeping in good with his political party. The city manager did his job and refuted the claims when asked by press and by the campaign itself. He told the truth. But that might not be enough.

In the wake of these lies, there have been death threats against individuals, bomb threats to schools and businesses and a devastating impact to people’s lives, community cohesion and to the local government’s bottom line. Mayor Rue estimated that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent to deal with the disruption caused by hateful actions. A planned visit by the GOP candidate was dropped after the Republican governor of the state pleaded for the campaign to give it a miss, citing not least further additional costs to the city.

From eating cats and dogs to raining cats and dogs, and lies about that, too.

The US isn’t just in the grip of election season, it’s hurricane season, too. In early October, unexpected flooding in the Appalachian mountains, well inland of Hurricane Helene’s coastal impact, led to a deluge of criticism of the current federal administration’s response. It wasn’t just that, but a series of lies intended to erode trust in disaster relief efforts. These included telling people their property could be condemned and seized if they reported storm damages to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or that initial emergency payments designed to help people deal with immediate costs would be the limit of assistance, because FEMA had run out of money.

These are the more plausible circulating rumours and lies. But there are wild lies that cause damage, too. Compounding and confounding matters, the mayor of hard-hit Asheville, North Carolina has been battling misinformation about relief efforts while being the subject of antisemitic slurs. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has stated ‘they’ can control the weather, implying that the devastating flooding in the highland South was planned and controlled. When the ‘zone is flooded’ with wild conspiracy theories about Jews, space lasers and climate, lies about budget or service mismanagement can seem sensible or even likely.

One could presume that the intention of candidates who are amplifying and spreading this disinformation is to erode confidence in Democratic incumbency, the impact is that people in dire need are avoiding taking up benefits which places their livelihoods and health in significant danger. While President Joe Biden addressed the misinformation efforts directly and FEMA is attempting to dispel myths on their website, for people with no internet or electricity and limited access to unbiased information this might be too little.

Electoral lies

The “Big Lie” about the 2020 Election, that Donald Trump and not Joe Biden really won hasn’t gone away. Americans and those who follow American politics may have become so inured to this lie that they may not notice the latest version of these lies about the 2024 election that are bubbling up. The allegations of fraud, of non-citizens voting to sway outcomes and of machines mysteriously changing votes are circulating again. Once again election workers are facing threats, lawsuits and disruption as they prepare for the 5 November election.

Local electoral services are having a harder time finding enough election workers as these barely-paid volunteers calculate that the warm glow of doing your civic duty isn’t worth the risk of having their lives blown up or worse. Professional electoral workers are leaving the service at higher rates than ever. This means that despite the diligent efforts of their remaining colleagues, it will be tougher than ever to deliver a smooth and painless voting experience, further eroding trust and confidence in democracy and local administration.

Perhaps even worse are the deliberate efforts to lie to voters about election logistics. Alongside deep-faked AI celebrity endorsements are automated phone calls to voters with incorrect information about polling dates, identification requirements or the threat of fines or arrest if they show up to the polling place.

To bring the disinformation full circle, rumours have been spreading that Haitians in the US illegally are voting in Georgia. The Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, who has oversight of local election administration in that state, has issued a statement outing the lie and beseeching Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), to act with moderation literally and figuratively. While the Governor blamed Russian troll farms for spreading lies, these efforts wouldn’t have the impact they do without the earlier scene-setting lies.

While many Americans are not aware of the rich and complicated history of Haiti, there is a general awareness that most Haitians are Black. So one could make the assumption that this disinformation has been designed to target suspicion and hostility toward Black voters who have tipped the balance toward Democratic candidates in recent Georgia elections.

To tell the truth: five ways to combat disinformation

Local government officials and election administrators can’t hide from the swirl of disinformation. It isn’t going away. Spin and rumours have always been present, but the advent of social media means that misunderstandings, distortions and outrageous lies can be spread more quickly. The almost magical qualities of artificial intelligence mean that lies are ever more convincing and visual. However, we can handle the truth and we must when it comes to shoring up trust in vital civic functions like election administration or public health. These five steps are critical to communicating about and countering misinformation:

Be alert to it.

Don’t think it can’t happen here (wherever here is for you). It has always happened, but now it can be bigger and across multiple channels. Working with communications professionals inside and outside of your organisation, set up systems to monitor for disinformation and be ready to counter it across multiple channels.

Empathise with the targeted community and get to the bigger truth

In the case of the pet-eating lies, there were at least three targets of the misinformation. We can see that Haitians were targeted, Democratic opponents were targeted and possibly the wider community of Black voters were the focus, too. But the targeted consumers of the misinformation were the pre-existing and predominantly white communities who have experienced significant change as a result of newcomers. Any community experiencing rapid growth will have issues of infrastructure strain and sometimes cultural friction. Acknowledging that there are issues and bringing communities together to find solutions, builds the trust that’s needed to confront the lies.

Many pundits scoffed at the lies about the confiscation of property in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Who would believe that? But many people in the Appalachians who were the targeted consumers of the disinformation (as well as its collateral damage) have folk memories of compulsory purchases and eminent domain claims to lands needed to build the TVA dams that power the region or the popular national parks and recreation areas in the area. Dubious methods by private companies have seen hills stripped away to get to the coal or lumber. As an Appalachian American myself, I get how it might have resonated. Dealing with the hard history honestly and helping people to understand how to safegaurd their property could limit the impact.

Build a culture of truth and accountability

Similarly, when there were claims of wide-spread and outcome-altering voting by non-citizens, many claimed that it could not happen that non-citizens cannot and do not vote. But it has happened, sort of. In some US jurisdictions, resident aliens can vote in local elections, and occasionally they’ve also voted illegally in Federal elections. It’s just vanishingly rare. But it’s possible to find counter-examples, if you look. Usually, individuals have been misinformed about their voting rights or mistakenly registered to vote and fewer than 100 cases have been found over several election cycles in a country of 300 million people. Being honest about even rare administrative errors is important when dealing with a distrustful audience. Perpetrating election fraud by getting huge numbers of ineligible people to vote would indeed be impossible in the current system, a handful of people slipping through the cracks isn’t.

It’s also important to explain what happens if it does. There are stiff penalties for people who knowingly commit electoral fraud. There are consequences for administrators. We need to have more accountability for those who lie about it.

Illustrate the intent and the impact

It’s hard to believe that a liked and trusted leader would lie to you, so part of combatting disinformation is to set out the case of why or to be honest if you don’t know the reason without necessarily ascribing blame.

Would calling out his party’s own leadership have helped Secretary of State Raffensperger make the case in Georgia? Maybe or maybe not. But he certainly highlighted some of the intent and called for unity when he said: “As Americans we can’t let our enemies use lies to divide us and undermine our faith in our institutions – or each other.”

The mayor of Canton, North Carolina Zeb Smathers, made a more emotional appeal. He described people who had lost everything and ‘watching their wedding albums float away’ in the flooding and asked people to pause and reflect before sharing and amplifying false stories that could prevent those people from accessing aid.

Invest in transparency

People will be far more susceptible to misinformation if they don’t understand how the system works. Most people have no idea how votes are counted or what happens to ballots. Most elections in England rely on hand-counted paper ballots – and pencils are given to voters to mark them. In advance of the 2016 European referendum a rumour was spreading that ‘Leave’ votes would be erased and voters should bring their own pens. We asked the Chief Executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators Peter Stanyon why pencils were used and his simple answer was that they always worked as long as you could see they had a point, and if they didn’t have a point you could sharpen them. He also explained that non-working pens could slow down the voting process and some inks could bleed through the paper endangering the privacy of the ballot.

In the 2020 US presidential election, Arizona’s race was tight and hotly contested. County election officials have been investing in ‘brutally transparent’ upgrades to buildings and ballot boxes. In Coconino County, they’ve spent 1.5 million dollars in what the elections director has described as a re-investment in the fundamental contract with the public.

I suspect most people won’t check up on the gritty details of election administration, but knowing that they can will provide reassurance for far more.

Democracy has a price

The five steps outlined above apply everywhere, although they’ll be different in detail, scale and scope across different local areas.  Even the least expensive intervention, speaking honestly, has a substantial cost in time and effort when local government officials are having to be so careful with their words and need to communicate them to many audiences over multiple channels.

Most public servants would rather spend precious budget on supporting prosperity, education or taking care of vulnerable people. However, disinformation which threatens democracy threatens all those aims, too.  Combatting misinformation is costly, not fighting it will cost more.