The 2024 election cycle is accompanied by a wave of rumors surrounding policies and candidates. Some of these rumors may hold truth, while others are false or unsubstantiated. To address this, the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) is working to educate about these rumors through its election blog series, a journalism help desk and public talks to the university community. 

“Primarily what we're trying to understand is how different communities, whether that's online or offline, are thinking and talking about the election and the kinds of things around election procedures and processes that they're talking about,” CIP Senior Research Scientist Rachel Moran said.

The CIP, based at the UW Information School, emphasizes using the word “rumor” rather than “mis-” or “disinformation.” 

“We use the word ‘rumor’ a lot, because sometimes these things that they talk about end up being true, but oftentimes they're unsubstantiated and turn into sort of mis- and disinformation,” Moran said. 

Moran joined the team in 2020, a time when some political figures were questioning the security of mail-in voting. With a background in journalism and communication studies, Moran focuses on translating the center’s research into actionable insights for journalists. 

She is working with Stephen Prochaska, an iSchool Ph.D. candidate, on how to best work and collaborate with journalists to get them the information they need to conduct timely reporting about uncertainty and rumors.

In September, the CIP announced the reboot of its election journalist help desk, a free support program that aims to assist local and national journalists in their coverage of election rumors.

“What we're trying to do is use the research that we have to sort of bridge the gap in those resource deficits that journalists have,” Moran said. “We're trying to reach out to a lot of local journalists or freelance journalists, or people who work in newsrooms and basically we offer ourselves up as a service.”

Moran describes the help desk as a resource for journalists who potentially have seen a rumor they are concerned about or have a question about a story they are reporting on.

“We can connect them with a researcher on our team who can help them work through some of their research questions,” Moran said. “[We] get them to the data and the kind of expert context, textual knowledge that they need, maybe provide them with an expert quote, and do that in a way that gets the story up quicker and in a clearer and more authoritative way.”

Another way that the CIP is performing election outreach is through its “What to expect when you’re electing” blog, one of the primary outputs for its rapid response work.

“We're identifying rumors in real time,” Prochaska said. “We have been releasing [the blog posts] based off of the rumors that we've seen historically, using our traditional research and recognizing that there are a lot of themes here that recur, and the same theories that continue to spread.” 

Prochaska said CIP researchers can often predict what rumors will arise.

“We're going to see a couple of rumors that are very similar at the beginning of the election,” Prochaska said. “Some things about mail-in ballots and then on Election Day we'll see kind of a different flavor.”

Moran noted that from survey data, trust in elections and institutions has declined in recent years. This decline highlights how election rumors and misinformation drive distrust in democratic, scientific and academic institutions. Moran argues that it fuels political polarization when people believe in a rigged election or mistrust that their vote will count.

“The mission is to identify these conversations and where they're happening, think about what platforms they're taking place on and how that might shape that conversation, and then also work with people who are on the other side trying to communicate factual evidence to see how to amplify the truth about elections and the security of elections,” Moran said

The team of researchers includes students from both graduate and undergraduate levels across various departments at the university. Both Moran and Prochaska highlight the value of undergraduate students in researching social media platforms, one of the main ways that the research team has been tracking rumors.

“Bringing in students who have often novel and really useful perspectives to bring into the conversation and are excited to do it helps,” Prochaska said. “Not only do we get diverse perspectives that can kind of shed light on different aspects of what we're studying, … we have these diverse perspectives that give us different ideas of how the rumor is functioning.”

No matter how the election unfolds, CIP researchers are certain rumors will spread, and they are ready to confront them.

“We don't know how the election results are going to play out, but what we do know is that whatever happens, there's going to be contestation about the security of the election,” Prochaska said.