| After the 2018 election, a team of researchers surveyed more than 4,200 people and exposed them to tweets claiming voter fraud. The people in the study either saw non-political tweets, or a series of tweets from politicians alleging voter fraud. Some participants saw a series of factchecking tweets after they saw the voter fraud ones. The people who saw the voter fraud tweets reported less confidence in elections than those who saw non-political tweets, the study found. The factchecks did not have a measurable effect on voter confidence. “Our results show that exposure to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud from prominent Republicans reduces confidence in elections, especially among Republicans and individuals who approve of Donald Trump’s performance in office,” researchers wrote in the study, published this week in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. “Worryingly, exposure to fact-checks that show these claims to be unfounded does not measurably reduce the damage from these accusations.” “The results suggest that unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud undermine the public’s confidence in elections, particularly when the claims are politically congenial, and that these effects cannot easily be ameliorated by fact-checks or counter-messaging.” The study leaves unanswered how exactly elected officials and other experts can go about restoring voter confidence after a politician claims fraud. The researchers suggest studying whether factchecks from GOP figures and conservative news outlets might help restore voter confidence. “Dismissals from prominent Republican officials themselves might be more influential as they signal intra-party disagreement,” they write. “However, such messengers may alternatively be subject to negative evaluation by way of a “black sheep effect”. Also worth watching … Voting activists are openly questioning whether Joe Biden and Democrats are meeting the moment around voting rights. “He’s phoning it in,” one activist told me. The justice department last week filed its biggest voting rights lawsuit since 2013, challenging a new law in Georgia that puts several new restrictions on voting-by-mail, among other provisions. The DoJ is challenging the law under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, arguing the Georgia law “was enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color”. Nearly 44,000 people who had their voter registrations canceled in Georgia as part of a mass purge in 2017 wound up re-registering and voting in 2020, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Some of the voters had been removed in part because they hadn’t voted in recent elections. The fact that they ultimately voted in 2020 raises more questions around whether inactivity is an appropriate proxy to gauge whether or not someone should come off the voter rolls. Officials in Maricopa county, Arizona, announced they will not use election equipment that was inspected as part of a widely criticized review of the 2020 election results. | 