Immersed in misinformation – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Voting Integrity Messages Fight Misinformation in the Lab. But What about the Real World?

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. 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’s authors say. ….[READ]