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August 29, 2025<\/p>\n
4 min read<\/p>\n
Voting Integrity Messages Fight Misinformation in the Lab. But What about the Real World?<\/p>\n
Telling people exactly how voting security works helps defeat election misinformation, experiments suggest. But outside experts question how well that works in the real world<\/p>\n
By Dan Vergano edited by Jeanna Bryner<\/span><\/p>\n People cast their ballots on November 5, 2024 in New York City.<\/p>\n Wang Fan\/China News Service\/VCG\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Safeguards keep fake ballots from being counted. Election officials regularly update voter lists. Voting machine software undergoes rigorous testing.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 2022 midterm elections and in Brazil after its presidential election that same year. With false claims of faked election results having figured into the January 6, 2021, mob assault on the U.S. Capitol and reelected U.S. president Donald Trump having made false claims about mail-in ballots and voting machines in August 2025, combating election falsehoods matters very much, the new study\u2019s authors say.<\/p>\n \u201cAround the world, we\u2019ve seen attacks on election integrity, and it\u2019s become clear that defending democracy requires debunking or effectively countering that misinformation,\u201d says study co-author Brian Fogarty, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame. What he and his colleagues found most effective was \u201cgenuinely novel information,\u201d he says\u2014such as details on exactly how voting security is ensured at the polls and in the counting of votes.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n \u201cThe facts actually matter,\u201d says psychology professor Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University, who was not a co-author of the study. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n While Pennycook and other outside experts applaud the experiments as excellent research, however, they question their relevance in real elections. In the U.S. and Brazil, these experts note, voters are immersed in misinformation from talk radio, television personalities and, in the case of the U.S., even the country\u2019s current president\u2014and this fouls the information environment in which straightforward messages about election security can be delivered to them.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know people are misinformed. Can just one message in a sea of misinformation offset a diet of misinformation on social media,\u201d and cable television, asks communications scholar Nathan Walter of Northwestern University, who was not part of the study. \u201cEating one protein shake doesn\u2019t counter all the cheeseburgers you had.\u201d<\/p>\n The study consisted of three experiments. The first two, which respectively included nearly 3,800 respondents in the U.S. and more than 2,900 in Brazil, tested attacks on voting integrity from political leaders of losing parties against \u201cprebunking\u201d information about how votes are secured that were preceded by warnings about conspiracy theories. As a control measure, some participants heard messages with information that was entirely unrelated to voting. Prebunking worked in both the U.S. and Brazil, and it was particularly effective among those most skeptical of election security and had a more lasting effect. Notably, the U.S. voting security information was taken from the (now deleted) \u201cRumor vs. Reality\u201d section of the website of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency.<\/p>\n The third experiment of 2,000 participants from the first experiment tested prebunking messages with and without the added conspiracy forewarnings. Somewhat surprisingly, the prebunking messages without the forewarnings about conspiracy theories proved most effective in countering misinformation, the study showed. Beliefs in false statements dropped from 19.5 percent in the control group to 12.3 percent in the forewarning group and to 10.6 percent among the participants who received simple explanations without forewarnings.<\/p>\n With the 2026 U.S. midterms ahead, voting groups, civil society organizations and journalists can take the study\u2019s results as pointers to better showing people the lengthy steps taken to ensure that voting fraud is unbelievably rare in elections, writes Nat\u00e1lia Bueno of Emory University in a companion article published in Science Advances.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat seems to matter is this novel factual information is provided in the prebunking message, which is helping people understand how elections are secure,\u201d Fogarty says. \u201cWe think these are encouraging findings with important implications for how to communicate with the public about election integrity going forward.\u201d While the Trump administration has removed the DHS webpage with facts about election integrity that was used in one of the experiments, the study authors suggest voting rights groups could turn to the National Association of State Election Directors or National Conference of State Legislatures for similar prebunking explanations.<\/p>\n The U.S. federal government can no longer be considered a good-faith player in ensuring fair elections, however, says cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol in England, pointing to the Trump administration\u2019s embrace of 2020 false election claims. That makes even the most scientific prebunking look less useful as a tool for stabilizing democracy, warns Lewandowsky, who wasn\u2019t involved in the new study. \u201cThe U.S. is now best characterized as an emerging autocracy with a very tenuous hold on democracy and lawfulness,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American<\/span> has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American<\/span> subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm <\/span>always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" August 29, 2025 4 min read Voting Integrity Messages Fight Misinformation in the Lab. But What about the Real World? Telling people exactly how voting security works helps defeat election misinformation, experiments suggest. But outside experts question how well that works in the real world By Dan Vergano edited by Jeanna Bryner People cast their<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[2171,9748,11112,2813,290,455,3578,550],"class_list":{"0":"post-18249","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-fight","9":"tag-integrity","10":"tag-lab","11":"tag-messages","12":"tag-misinformation","13":"tag-real","14":"tag-voting","15":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
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