The Grassroots Efforts To Spread Election Conspiracies

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

News, Politics, Daily News

4.4 • 25.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Election misinformation has spread beyond the confines of social media to local, grassroots events taking place throughout the country. An NPR investigation explores the role four prominent election denial influencers have in promoting false claims about the 2020 election, and how the events they hold & the ideas they promote affect election officials — and erode trust in the democratic process.

This episode: political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, political correspondent Miles Parks, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Sarah, and Rusey, and we are in Washington, D.C.
0:04.4	And we are here to attend the American Library Association annual conference
0:08.8	with a lot of authors and illustrators and librarians.
0:12.4	This podcast was recorded at 105 PM on Wednesday, July 6, 2022.
0:18.4	Things may have changed by the time you hear it.
0:20.8	Okay, here's the show!
0:26.1	God, it's just so purely good. What an excellent time stamp.
0:29.6	I've heard that librarians are really underrated. Underrated professional.
0:32.4	Yeah. Okay, there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzlaven. I cover politics.
0:37.2	I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.
0:39.0	And I'm Dominica Montenar, a Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.
0:42.3	And today we are talking about disinformation about elections, and there is a lot of it.
0:47.4	As disinformation and lies about elections continue to spread, the messaging behind these false
0:51.6	claims has diversified. In addition to spreading the big lie on big national platforms like on Fox
0:57.6	News or Twitter, conspiracists are going smaller. They're also focusing their attention on local
1:03.2	officials, creating grassroots efforts that you, Miles, have been following. So let's talk about it.
1:09.2	Yeah, basically what happened is over the last year and a half covering voting,
1:13.2	I've kind of realized that when we were covering elections in 2020, so much of misinformation
1:19.6	around voting was coming from Donald Trump's Twitter account. And that's not the case anymore.
1:23.6	He is not on Twitter anymore. And so now what I kind of realized is that it was happening in places
1:29.8	I couldn't really see it. At all of these kind of local events I was seeing, kind of event
1:34.5	notifications in different towns for like election integrity rallies with prominent election conspiracy
	...

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