Election Rumors

Election rumors are false or misleading claims about electoral processes, candidate fitness, voting administration, and election outcomes. These rumors often spread during high-uncertainty moments—particularly around voting day and post-election periods—and can undermine public trust in democratic institutions and motivate offline action.

The scope includes rumors about mail-in voting fraud, voting machine malfunctions, voter suppression, election official misconduct, foreign interference in election administration, and post-election challenges (recounts, litigation, conspiracy theories about stolen elections). Election rumors typically organize around canonical narrative templates that recur across election cycles: "lost ballots," "hacked machines," "ghost voters," and "corrupted officials."

Key papers

• New Election, Same Old Story: How Tropes Form a Grammar of Election Rumors — Three-layer framework (meta/meso/micro tropes) for analyzing the narrative structure of election rumors

Related topics

• Election Integrity (the core concern that rumors threaten)
• Rumor detection on social media (broader methodology)
• Propaganda (intentional coordination vs. organic rumors)
• Misinformation (the broader category)