"Safeguards keep fake ballots from being counted. Election officials regularly update voter lists. Voting machine software undergoes rigorous testing. Telling voters such simple facts helps combat election misinformation, suggests a Science Advances study released on Friday. In the investigation, researchers performed messaging experiments with voters in the U.S. before the nation's 2022 midterm elections and in Brazil after its presidential election that same year."
"What he and his colleagues found most effective was genuinely novel information, he sayssuch as details on exactly how voting security is ensured at the polls and in the counting of votes. The facts actually matter, says psychology professor Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University, who was not a co-author of the study. This is a very strong set of experiments, and I think the conclusion is very important: the best way to help guard people against misinformation is to provide accurate countervailing information."
Safeguards keep fake ballots from being counted. Election officials regularly update voter lists. Voting machine software undergoes rigorous testing. Simple factual messages explaining these procedures reduce belief in election falsehoods. Messaging experiments with voters in the U.S. before the 2022 midterms and in Brazil after the 2022 presidential contest found that novel, specific details about how ballots are secured and counted produced the largest effects. Accurate countervailing information helps guard people against misinformation. Some outside experts praise the experimental design but question how well the results generalize to real election contexts, indicating a need for field validation.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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