On Twitter, Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA, tweeted a quote from the ABC article, implying that coverage of the potential issue was designed to set a “narrative” that could then be blamed on COVID.

Given the ambiguity of Kirk’s tweet, it is helpful to look at its reception to understand how the tweet is being interpreted by his audience.

Online audiences appear to be interpreting Kirk’s tweet primarily as “evidence” of alleged attempts to commit election fraud — in a similar way to conspiracy theories emerging from 2020.

For example, one person responded to Kirk by saying that anyone can see upcoming “midterm election cheating.” Other members of the audience have similar interpretations, claiming that the errors “will only affect GOP ballots” or that it is “more voter fraud setup.”

These types of interpretations are not founded in fact, nor do they offer specific critiques of potential ballot paper shortages.

Discussion of the incident is taking place across multiple platforms but appears to be most prominent on Twitter and Telegram.

Here is a cumulative temporal graph of Twitter data, where we can see discussion take off right after Kirk’s tweet on October 17 (currently retweeted over 3,000 times). faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/follow…

Conversations appear to be leading online audiences to interpret future consequences of the ballot paper shortage as evidence of fraud rather than legitimate, nuanced, and difficult problems resulting from ongoing economic impacts due to COVID.

Such conversations echo similar narratives surrounding previous errors, where accidents are reframed as “evidence” of fraud, something we have written about in more detail in a previous blogpost.
eipartnership.net/blog/understan…

As election day approaches, we anticipate seeing more examples of errors being interpreted as alleged “evidence” of fraud.

Influential accounts will continue to prime audiences ahead of time to interpret any novel events as “evidence” of fraud instead of genuine errors or challenges that inevitably result from large complex systems.