‘Prebunking’ false claims can increase public trust in elections

With the control of the Congress and a control of the Trump administration in question during the mid-term elections of 2026, the next electoral cycle could again see the allegations of electoral fraud. But warn voters in advance that there may be false complaints on the elections and provide them with information on election security measures by “prebestion Scientific advances.

“The prebonation is effective because it provides people with new facts on how the elections are guaranteed,” said co-author Brendan Nyhan, presidential professor of James O. Freedman of government in Dartmouth.

To examine whether corrective information can change false belief in generalized electoral fraud, the research team has conducted a series of studies in the United States and Brazil to assess perceptions on past and future elections.

The two countries were selected due to the prevalence of erroneous perceptions on the fraud of voters and elections after President Donald Trump lost against Joe Biden in 2020 and that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro lost against Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva in 2022. The two holders promoted fraud complaints, and supporters took their own capitols protest.

Studies were conducted online in the United States before the mid-term elections of 2022 and in Brazil after its presidential elections in 2022. Each study contrasted the effect of prebonation with a treatment of credible sources, which tests the effect of the hearing of sources which could be the most convincing for those enclosed to be skeptical.

More than 5,500 participants from the two countries were interviewed online on their point of view on the credibility of the elections via Yougov in the United States and the quality in Brazil. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two treatment conditions or a control group:

• The first group has received information on pre -britches with facts on the security measures of the elections in place in their country with a warning that others can make false claims to mislead them with regard to a future election. Previous studies have shown that exposure to corrective information can be effective in discerning fiction facts. In the United States, for example, participants have received information on how elections are secured via stages such as voting machines, validation of voting ballots by mail and the use of secure dropboxes to collect the ballots.
• The second group was allocated to “credible sources” treatment in which they received information on Trump’s allies in the United States in 2020 or in Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2022 or credible neutral sources which affirmed the result of previous as legitimate elections (for example, Republican judges and officials, the son of Bolsonaro, the Brazilian election agency, etc.).

The first study was conducted in the United States, the second in Brazil, and the third was also administered in the United States

In the United States, in the United States, sources of prebonation and credible has proven to be effective.

For the treatment of prebonation in the next elections in 2022, the beliefs that Biden won in 2020 and confidence in the 2020 elections increased, while the number of seats of the house that people thought they were won by fraud in 2020 have decreased.

The results were similar for the treatment of credible sources. The results showed that among the Republicans, the conviction that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 elections went from 33% in the control group 44% for credible sources and 39% for prebunking.

In Brazil, prebunking seemed to be more effective than information from credible sources, increased by confidence in the elections of 2022 and 2026 and reduce beliefs concerning the prevalence of electoral fraud in both.

For the third study, which was conducted in the United States after the mid-term elections in 2022, the authors again found that the participants expressed more confidence in the elections and less belief in fraud if they received the prebonation.

In particular, these effects were only observed when they have omitted the part of the prebrit treatment which warns people that they may meet with false information, which suggests that the new information provided to the processing participants are the most important factor, rather than the way this information is supervised.

“These results are encouraging,” said co-author John Carey, Professor John Wentworth in the Social Sciences and Interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“You often hear that people are not sensitive to the facts or interested in details, but our experiences have increased the precision of beliefs, even among those who have started the most committed to ideas that are not supported by evidence.”

Co-authors say that local elections and governments and states should share information on how elections are guaranteed to help pre-empt the false fraud complaints that can reduce faith in the integrity of the elections.