The tweets began to arrive Wednesday night, carrying explosive claims that people in Michigan were voting under the names of dead people.
Austen Fletcher, a former Ivy League football player turned right-wing internet journalist, said in videos posted to Twitter that he had discovered registration documents on a State of Michigan website that showed that four people with reported birth dates from 1900 to 1902 had submitted absentee ballots ahead of Tuesday’s election. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.
By Thursday morning, Mr. Fletcher’s videos were the talk of the Republican internet. “Why is it taking regular Americans to expose this level of obvious corruption?” said Candace Owens, a conservative commentator, sharing one of the videos to her 2.7 million Twitter followers.
Yet a few phone calls by Mr. Fletcher would have revealed evidence that indicates that what appeared to be fraud were run-of-the-mill clerical errors.
In one case, a 74-year-old woman in Hamlin Township, Mich., had asked for an absentee ballot for the first time in years, setting off a notice from the state’s digital voter rolls that her birth date was not on file, according to Catherine Lewis, the town’s clerk. The system had assigned the woman the default birth date: 01/01/01, or Jan. 1, 1901.
Ms. Lewis said she knew the woman. Hamlin Township, a rural community on Lake Michigan, has just 3,400 people. She said she had driven to the woman’s home and collected a copy of her driver’s license so she could vote by mail. But Ms. Lewis had not gotten around to updating her file. “Rest assured,” Ms. Lewis said, “she is a legal voter.”
Then, on Thursday morning, after a marathon week for Ms. Lewis running the town’s vote, her phone began ringing. “I have had 18 calls and at least 20 strange emails asking me if I committed voter fraud,” she said. She was staying home with her family. “I need to be concerned about my family’s welfare,” she said.
In a text message on Friday, Mr. Fletcher, who goes by the pseudonym Fleccas online, said he was about to publish evidence that thousands of ballots in Michigan had been submitted under the names of dead people. He declined to speak on the phone. “Who is requesting, filling out, and returning these ballots,” he said in his message. “How many got thru? That’s my question.”
Since the polls closed on Tuesday, a number of internet sleuths have widely disseminated what they said was evidence that showed Democrats were trying to steal the election. In virtually every case so far, mainstream journalists have found the claims to be false or the product of typical errors in the election process.
Yet many people have not heard the truth behind the claims they are sharing — or, if they have, have dismissed it. Social media has created echo chambers where people hear largely from like-minded voices. And President Trump’s years of attacks on the media have caused many of his supporters to distrust…
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