Pennsylvania quickly emerged on Tuesday as a hot spot for election disinformation and bogus claims of voter fraud. The vast majority of posts on X about election fraud were focused on the swing state, according to an analysis by PeakMetrics, an analytics company.
Those claims have ricocheted around the internet as influencers and users on X, Truth Social and other platforms shared them to millions of views, sowing confusion even as election officials worked to refute them.
The polls had not even closed yet in Pennsylvania when former President Donald J. Trump declared that voter fraud could taint the results.Citing no specific cases or anecdotes, he declared there was “a lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” to his more than 8 million followers on Truth Social, an online social media platform owned by his media company.
Philadelphia’s chief law enforcement body was quick to reply: Larry Krasner, the city’s district attorney, issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump’s comments had “no factual basis.”
“If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now,” Mr. Krasner wrote on X. “We are not holding our breath.”
Pennsylvania is seen as pivotal to both candidates’ chances of winning the presidency.
More than 60 percent of posts discussing election fraud in battleground states on X focused on Pennsylvania, according to an analysis of about 25,000 posts on the platform by PeakMetrics. The second-most discussed state, North Carolina, was included in about 9 percent of posts.
Some of the claims relied on exaggerated versions of genuine voting troubles that affected some Pennsylvania counties, while others were wholesale fabrications. There was no evidence that any incidents impacted the ability to collect votes.
In Cambria County, a rural enclave home to 130,000 people who are historically aligned with the Republican Party, election officials opened the polls and quickly realized its ballot-scanning devices could not read the ballots. A software fix was required.
Voters were still able to fill out paper ballots while the county worked on a solution, depositing them into secure lockboxes for counting later. But election deniers have spent years stoking doubts about that option, suggesting without evidence that it was an avenue to steal or destroy ballots.
Some voters in Cambria County seemed to have declined to use the lockboxes, according to videos circulating online. Courts extended the voting period there to 10 p.m., from the original deadline of 8 p.m.
To election officials, the ordeal was a sign that its election process had functioned normally: They overcame a technical problem by deploying a simple fallback option. But election deniers online were not convinced.
After an influencer on X posted that the machines were down in “deep red” Cambria County, a flood of election fraud claims came trickling in, suggesting it was part of an effort to steal the race.
Other reports circulated online Tuesday that voters were being bused into Philadelphia from neighboring states, many featuring a video showing a line of people waiting to board a bus. In fact, those people were volunteers who were traveling to Pennsylvania as part of a get-out-the-vote campaign.
Multiple phony bomb threats disrupted voting across Philadelphia as polling sites were briefly evacuated, according to the city’s district attorney. To online conspiracy theorists, though, the events were described as cover to clear out a voting site so that some agent could interfere with ballots or voting machines.
Other claims focused on power outages or machine malfunctions in counties across the state. Those spreading the claims said they were evidence of voter fraud.
Cait Conley, a senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Tuesday evening of the reports of widespread voter fraud emerging from the state: “We have no data or reporting to support these claims.”
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