How online rumors about non-citizen voting can affect the offline voting experience.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Kimberly Adams. Among the various trends of mis and disinformation spreading ahead of the 2024 election

is the narrative that large groups of non-citizens are illegally voting. I spoke with

Dr. Danielle Lee Thompson,

a research manager with the University of Washington

Center for an informed public,

about how this narrative is affecting

this year's general election.

With non-citizen voting, oftentimes what we're seeing

is something called evidence generation.

Now, evidence generation is where you have a photo, a video, or a claim that folks use to push a narrative.

And in the case of non-citizen voting, we're seeing a lot of this.

So what is often happening,

you might see certain organizations

that are collecting videos that they claim

are evidence of non-citizen voting in the United States.

Now, this can be spun up to claim, oh my goodness, look at all these people

who shouldn't be voting and who are voting and this could swing the election in a certain direction.

It just reported this week by the New York. swing the election in a certain direction.

It just reported this week by the New York Times

that the Heritage Foundation had been filming

...