Misinformation undermines voter confidence in democratic elections

What's this about?

People disagree about whether false claims about vote fraud can hurt trust in fair elections.

The effect can change with the group, the message, the app, the land, and the time.

What supporters say

• When true facts and fraud checks raise trust, false claims likely hurt trust first.
• Tests show that false fraud claims can lower trust in how well elections work.
• People who believe false claims often trust vote groups less.

What critics say

• Seeing false claims on social media does not always change views about fair elections.
• False election claims reach some people, not everyone, so their effect may stay small.

How to read this

The number of points on each side does not show who is right; strong proof matters more than a long list.

The bottom line

The proof strongly backs a small claim: false election claims can lower trust in a certain election.

But we are not sure they cause all distrust, or that they always harm trust in fair rule.

Misinformation about election fraud can weaken people’s confidence in whether elections are conducted fairly. But the effect is not universal: it varies by audience, message, platform, country and political climate.

The case for

The strongest evidence comes from experiments that directly tested what happens when people see unsupported claims of voter fraud. In a nationwide U.S. survey experiment, people who were shown such claims reported lower confidence in the integrity of elections. The effect was stronger when the misinformation fit their political views. Because researchers assigned people to receive the information before measuring their views, the findings support a cause-and-effect relationship rather than merely showing that distrustful people seek out misinformation. 1

Evidence from outside the United States points in the same direction. A four-wave study conducted around Brazil’s 2022 presidential election found that people who believed election misinformation had lower trust in the electoral process over time. Political and media conditions also shaped both what people saw and what they believed, suggesting that misinformation works alongside wider political forces rather than in isolation. 2

Studies of corrections provide additional, indirect support. In the United States and Brazil, prebunking efforts and credible information about election security increased confidence and reduced belief in fraud claims. A separate U.S. experiment found that fact-checking improved confidence among at least some groups. If reliable information can repair confidence, that is consistent with false information having damaged it in the first place. 3

Taken together, these findings strongly support a narrower claim: credible exposure to election misinformation can reduce confidence in a particular election. They do not show that misinformation is the main cause of distrust in every real-world setting, or that it necessarily reduces support for democracy itself.

The case against

The main challenge is that effects seen in information experiments may not translate into large, uniform effects across the whole population. A randomized study involving more than 35,000 users found that deactivating Facebook or Instagram produced effects close to zero on perceived election legitimacy, political polarization, candidate favorability and turnout. This suggests that ordinary social-media exposure does not always change how legitimate people think elections are. 4

Misinformation also appears to reach a relatively limited, highly concentrated audience. Web-browsing research found that untrustworthy websites made up only a small share of Americans’ information diets and were visited disproportionately by a smaller group of users. Those sites were visited by fewer Americans in 2020 than in 2016. This does not rule out strong effects among people who are heavily exposed or especially receptive, but it weakens the idea that misinformation routinely undermines confidence among most voters. 5

There is also a problem of direction. People who already distrust election institutions may be more likely to believe or seek out misinformation. Brazilian research describes a two-way relationship, in which distrust and misinformation belief reinforce each other. Large partisan differences in U.S. election confidence likewise cannot, on their own, show that misinformation caused the distrust. Survey answers may also reflect motivated reasoning or people expressing their political identity rather than reporting straightforward persuasion.

Finally, election confidence is not the same as support for democracy in general. One U.S. experiment found lower confidence in electoral integrity but no corresponding decline in support for democracy. Corrective information can help, but its success varies across groups and countries.

The bottom line

The evidence favours the claim, strongly but conditionally. Randomized experiments, panel research and correction studies show that election misinformation can reduce confidence in electoral integrity. The evidence is much weaker on how large that effect is across the population, how long it lasts, and how much real-world distrust is caused by misinformation rather than partisan identity, election outcomes or prior institutional distrust.

The best-supported conclusion is therefore not that misinformation universally delegitimizes democracy. It is that misinformation can undermine confidence in specific elections under particular conditions, with its impact depending heavily on who encounters it, what they already believe and the political environment around them.