Emerging Narratives Around ‘Mail Dumping’ and Election Integrity
Contributors: Ian Kennedy, Andrew Beers, Kolina Koltai, Morgan Wack, Joey Schafer, Paul Lockaby, Michael Caulfield, Michael Grass, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public; Isabella Garcia-Camargo, Stanford Internet Observatory
On Wednesday, Sept. 23, the hyper-partisan, right-wing news website Gateway Pundit published an article stating that a batch of mail — including absentee ballots — had been found in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The article, which borrowed heavily from local media for factual details about the actual incident, falsely framed the situation as evidence that Democrats were “stealing the 2020 election.” (There is no evidence that the incident was politically motivated, that it is part of a pattern or strategy, or that it will have any effect on the election.) The false framing built upon and amplified existing narratives that mail-in voting is untrustworthy and other unfounded claims that there will be widespread fraud in the 2020 U.S. election.
The Greenville story quickly began to gain traction on Twitter and Facebook, mostly among right-wing and pro-Trump networks of accounts. Soon, it made its way to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany who on Sept. 24 proclaimed, "Mass mail-out voting ... could damage either candidate’s chances because it's a system that's subject to fraud. In fact, in the last 24 hours, police in Greenville, Wisconsin, found mail in a ditch, and it included absentee ballots."
Interestingly, this story contained echoes — both in the narrative and in how it was going viral — of a previous story from early September about mail being dumped in Glendale, California. There is no evidence that the mail dumped in that earlier incident contained any election-related materials of ballots. But it still spawned a couple of competing narratives, one that aligned with the right-wing narratives to foment distrust in voting by mail, and another that resonated on the political left with previous criticisms of the Trump administration’s management of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
Though the facts around these particular mail-dumping incidents are not disputed, the framings — and the narratives that emerge from those framings — are misleading in a couple of important ways. They exaggerate the potential impact of these rare events on election results and they overlook safeguards and remedies (like ballot tracking) that could alleviate potential impacts. In cases like the Gateway Pundit article, the stories are used to support specious claims of an intentional strategy by an oppositional political party. However (and unfortunately), these stories are resonating with — and being intentionally mobilized to spread — existing meta-narratives about vulnerabilities in voting by mail and unfounded claims that there will be massive voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. election.
We can view these efforts to create and spread these false and damaging narratives as a kind of disinformation — i.e., false or misleading information, intentionally seeded and/or spread to achieve a political objective.
In this article, researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership provide some background on mail-dumping incidents generally and then describe (through a detailed data analysis) how these recent events were framed and mobilized online in support of narratives that question the integrity of the upcoming election.
It’s important to raise awareness of the misleading nature of these patterned narratives and to help the public understand who is mobilizing these false narratives and how. Based on what we’ve seen in the past few weeks, we expect to see more of these kinds of stories emerge and spread over the next few weeks. (Not surprisingly, after we began drafting this post, another claim about finding ballots in a dumpster in Sonoma, California began to go viral on Twitter.) Where available, they will use the “evidence” from real events to add support to these growing narratives. It is also possible that they will draw from previous events, integrating old photos and stories of mail dumping into these new narratives of voter fraud.
At the end of the article, we offer suggestions for platforms to help combat some of these tactics, and for conscientious users to contribute to a healthier information space by providing careful corrections.
Contextualizing Mail Dumping
Though incidents are rare, U.S. Postal Service letter carriers and related partners sometimes improperly discard mail. Given the volume of mail and number of mail carriers, the practice is enough to generate a small number of news stories every year. These include reports about mail found in dumpsters, and mail carriers prosecuted for delaying, dumping or destroying mail.
Why do some mail carriers engage in this infrequent practice? The most cited reason in both news stories and court cases is work overload. Carriers sometimes face pressure to deliver significant amounts of mail in short periods of time. This leads some letter carriers to throw away mail that they aren’t able to deliver.
Image from a mail-dumping incident from Bond Hill, Ohio, August 2014. (Source)
Image from a mail-dumping incident in Petersburg, Virginia, February 2018. (Source)
The fact that mail does get dumped or destroyed, even at a very low level of frequency, is a legitimate object of social concern. Many of these discussions intersect with — and gain new importance through — their relationship to mail-in voting and current issues around Postal Service management. Legitimate concerns include:
The concern that cuts to the Postal Service may be resulting in a heavy workload that creates increased incentives to dump mail. This is often a perspective from the political left: “Increased USPS cuts are leading to intentional dysfunction.”
The concern that destruction of mail could lead to people not receiving their ballots or ballot applications, or the less well-founded concern that returned ballots might not be delivered and would ultimately go uncounted. This is often a perspective from the political right: “Mail-in voting is not secure.”
That said, mail dumping is a relatively rare practice, and there are strong incentives against it. When postal workers are caught, they can face jail time. A U.S. Department of Justice brief puts the maximum jail time at five years. Though most would not serve near that amount of time, it is common in news coverage to see carriers convicted of mail dumping sentenced to significant amounts of time.
In addition, there are safeguards in place for tracking ballots which make it unlikely that a large number of ballots — enough to sway an election — could go missing in a mail dumping event without triggering the attention of election officials.
So while the mail dumping events do form legitimate objects of social concern, they are, at present, rare, almost always not politically targeted, severely punished, and unlikely to have a significant impact on the election.
How Mail Dumping Incidents are Exploited
These mail-dumping events can be leveraged in a number of ways to mislead audiences for political objectives. We have identified five salient techniques:
Falsely assigning intent: Acts that are not political might be framed as political. For instance, a local mail-dumping event could be falsely framed as specifically targeting voters on one side of the political spectrum. A mail carrier could be identified as a “Democrat” or “Republican” to suggest malicious intent. Too much significance might be given to the demographics of the locality an event occurs in. Though these cases may at times contain added facts that aren’t true, often they will be more implication than assertion — and therefore hard to refute with fact-checking.
Exaggerate impact: Real incidents may be highlighted, selectively edited, and otherwise exaggerated to give a false appearance of substantial impact on election results or a widespread pattern of misbehavior.
Falsely framing the date: Posters may frame old events as newly happening, for instance, sharing a 2014 video of a letter carrier dumping mail as an event that occurred within the last few weeks.
Altering locale: Posters might alter the locale of an event to make it seem more relevant to an audience. For instance, photos from the Glendale, California incident could be framed as having happened in a (different) local community.
Strategic amplification: In addition to false framing, the usual amplification concerns apply, with the potential for honest or not-so-honest mistakes about intent, actors, times, and locales to be amplified by domestic networks of politically motivated accounts and possibly even foreign actors.
Social Media Analysis: Revealing How Misleading Narratives Around Mail Dumping Take Shape and Go Viral
The Greenville and Glendale incidents from above are two recent “mail dumping” events that received significant attention in online discussions — and were used in misleading ways to support politically-motivated narratives questioning the security of mail-in voting. Here, we provide an in-depth analysis to understand how these narratives are taking shape and being mobilized by social media influencers and various media outlets.
Twitter Data
The data for this analysis include two datasets drawn from an ongoing collection of Twitter data (using the Streaming API). That collection picks up tweets with terms relating to voting and ballots. Its size is currently over 300 million tweets. From that set, we created two subsets, one for each of the “mail dumping” events.
The first dataset is the Glendale CA Mail Dumping Subset, which includes all tweets posted between Sept. 3 and Sept. 15 that include the terms “dump” and “mail.” That subset contains 121,662 total tweets. 87.2% of those are retweets and 78% include a URL to an external website. Below is a temporal graph (tweets over time) for that dataset, showing that the event was discussed on Twitter in four different waves of activity. The first began, quite rapidly, on Sept. 5 at 18:24 UTC (11:24 a.m. Pacific Time) and peaked at about 2,000 tweets per hour. That wave was followed by three slightly larger waves on three subsequent days.
Figure 1: Temporal Graph of the Glendale CA Mail Dumping Subset
The second set is the Greenville WI Mail Ditching Subset, which includes tweets posted between Sept. 23 and Sept. 25 that include the terms “ditch” and “mail.” This subset contains 97,534 total tweets, 91.3% of which are retweets and 61.9% of which include a URL to an external website. Below is a temporal graph (tweets over time) for that dataset. The elevated tweet rate at the end of the graph demonstrates that the narrative was still spreading when we conducted our analysis. We can also see that the overall rates for information sharing around the Greenville event are higher (in tweets per hour) than the maximum tweet rate of the Glendale case. This suggests that these mail-dumping events may be becoming more salient in election-related conversations.
Figure 2: Temporal Graph of the Greenville WI Mail Ditching Subset
Case 1: Mail Dumping in Glendale, California (Sept. 3, 2020)
On September 3, multiple bags of unopened mail were discovered by a salon worker in a dumpster in Glendale CA. Police were notified and an investigation was begun. There is no evidence that any ballots were among the discarded mail, which was all eventually returned to the USPS and placed back in circulation. However, as news of this event began to spread, techniques like falsely assigning intent, exaggerating impact, and strategic amplification were used to falsely frame and mobilize this event to undermine trust in mail-in voting and election results.
Local media reported on the incident the next day. Discussion of this event first appeared in our data after the local Fox News affiliate tweeted out a link to an article featuring surveillance video of a person putting mail from a rental truck into a dumpster. Initial spread was slow, but the event — and emerging narratives around the event — began to pick up quickly after @joshdcaplan (the home page editor for Breitbart news) tweeted the following:
Discussion of the Mail Dumping Event in Glendale Took Place on “Both Sides” of a Politically Divided Twittersphere
This tweet set off the first of several waves of conversation about the event. Structural analysis reveals that discussion around the Glendale mail-dumping event took place on “both sides” of the political spectrum.
The animated graph above (Figure 3) shows a map of popular accounts tweeting about voting and the election-related topics since Aug. 1, 2020. Each node in this map is an influential Twitter account, and a link between two accounts means that multiple users in our election and voting datasets have retweeted both accounts multiple times. This means that accounts that are retweeted by a similar audience will clump together in this graph, and accounts with separate audiences will drift apart. Bigger nodes have more connections to other accounts, and nodes are colored according to which cluster of nodes they are most connected to. (Clusters are determined by a “community-detection” algorithm).
Not surprisingly, the network graph of influential Twitter users reveals two separate meta-clusters — one on the political “left” (left side of the graph) and another on the political “right” (right side). Another structural feature of the graph is that each meta-cluster consists of two distinct sub-clusters, something we’ll explore in future analysis.
The animation shows how tweets about the Glendale mail-dumping incident spread across influential accounts in the Twittersphere. While this story initially started to spread via conservative influencers, it soon crossed the divide to liberal influencers — although to a somewhat lesser extent. On the liberal side of the network we analyzed, there were 135 posts, with 30,381 retweets between them. Contrast with the conservative side, which had 286 posts with 86,729 retweets between them.
The Mail-Dumping Event was Framed Differently on the Two Political Sides
Conservatives and liberals used the facts of the Glendale story in different ways. Conservatives tended to use this story to imply that mail-in voting is not safe and should not be used, due to either the incompetence or deliberate sabotage by the U.S. Postal Service. One conservative influencer, Adam Paul Lexalt, wrote: “Secure the vote! No universal mail-in balloting.” Another, Charlie Kirk, tweeted sarcastically:
Liberal influencers instead used this story to stress the importance of preserving mail-in voting, despite what they interpreted as deliberate sabotage of the USPS by the Trump administration. One liberal influencer, Matt Oswalt, tweeted:
Another prominent liberal tweeter, George Takei, used this story to advise his followers not to mail in ballots at all: “The video showing the dumping of mail has the (perhaps intended) effect of causing the public to lose faith in the mail system, particularly when it comes to mailed ballots. Fight back by DROPPING OFF your completed ballot in a county election Dropbox.” This comment reflects a sense that this story — and the meta-narratives it was leveraged to support — were having an impact on perceptions of the security of mail in voting on both sides of the political spectrum.
Local Media Outlets Provided the Content; Social Media Users and Partisan Media Provided the Frames
Most users tweeting this story also included a link — 78% of tweets in the Glendale CA Mail Dumping Subset had a URL linking to an external website. Table 1 (below) shows the most tweeted domains in the data.
Table 1: Most Tweeted Domains in the Glendale CA Mail Dumping Dataset
Table 1: Most Tweeted Domains in the Glendale CA Mail Dumping Dataset
The three most visible media outlets in our Twitter data were a local broadcast media outlet (KTLA), a national television outlet (CBS News), and a local newspaper with national readership (Los Angeles Times). The tweeted articles from these outlets were primarily fact-based, relaying the incident to their audiences. However, the KTLA and Los Angeles Times articles included comments connecting the event to ongoing criticisms of the USPS.
Social media users on the political left carried over and built upon the framing from KTLA and the Los Angeles Times in their tweets — using the incident to further criticisms of the Trump administration’s management of the USPS.
Social media users on the political right re-contextualized the information from the articles within their own framing — using the incident to further distrust of mail-in voting. Eventually, they also came to rely on content from partisan right-wing media (i.e. Washington Examiner, Townhall, Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit and Zero Hedge) to enhance and sharpen this framing. The articles hosted on those domains included content specifically framing this event as an election security issue.
This analysis shows how information around a mail-dumping event was covered by local media, picked up and re-framed by social media users and hyper-partisan media (on the right), and used — by individuals and organizations on both sides of the political spectrum — to spread narratives that function to undermine trust in the security of mail-in voting.
Case 2: Mail Found in a Ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin (Sept. 23, 2020)
On Sept. 23, another batch of mail was found, improperly disposed of, in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The mail was turned over to the postal service who reported that, unlike the Glendale case, it did contain absentee ballots. Officials have not commented on the exact number of ballots found — the original description was “several.” However, it is not likely that the number of ballots discarded would have a significant impact on the election. And it is likely that these ballots are or will soon be returned to circulation.
Again in this instance, techniques like falsely assigning intent, exaggerating impact, and strategic amplification were used to distort the significance of this event and feed false narratives about mail-in voting and voter fraud.
Though local media covered this event, the first tweet in our Voter Fraud data collection that mentions mail in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin was posted by @gatewaypundit:
The Gateway Pundit is a right-wing media outlet founded by Jim Hoft, whose name is affiliated with the @gatewaypundit Twitter account. This tweet, which contains an embedded link to an article on the media outlet’s website, had received 4,600 retweets at the time of this screenshot (on Sept. 24). It set off the first peak of activity around the narrative (visible in Figure 2 above). Demonstrating sustained participation in these mail-dumping narratives, the Gateway Pundit website is also among the top-10 most tweeted domains in the Glendale CA Mail Dumping Dataset. Its article — which relies almost completely on other sources for its factual information and contains very little original content, with the notable exception of two sentences falsely framing the event as voter fraud by Democrats — was tweeted and retweeted almost 25,000 times.
Discussion of the Mail-Dumping Event in Greenville Was Concentrated on the Political Right
Unlike the case of the Glendale mail-dumping incident which took on two framings on the two sides of the U.S. political spectrum, this report of mail dumping in Greenville has spread (in its first 30 hours) almost exclusively on the “right” side of the political spectrum — through right-wing and conservative media outlets, political and social media influencers and pro-Trump accounts.
The animated graph below (Figure 4) was built using the same technique — and the same underlying structure — as the graph in Figure 3 above. In this case, we show the parts of the graph that were active in spreading content around the Greenville, WI mail dumping incident.
Figure 4. Animated Network Graph Showing How Narratives about the Greenville, WI Mail-Dumping Event Spread Primarily through Politically Conservative and Pro-Trump Accounts
Hyper-Partisan, Right-Wing Media Provided the Framing for this Event
The graph shows that narratives around this event spread almost exclusively on the right (politically conservative and pro-Trump) side of the graph. Among the most retweeted accounts in this dataset are @charliekirk11 (founder of conservative action group Turning Point USA and recently implicated in running a domestic “troll farm”), @gatewaypundit, @BreitbartNews and the account of its home page editor @joshdcaplan, Fox News contributor @SaraCarterDC and @LizRNC (a Republican National Committee spokesperson). Unlike the Glendale incident where the top domains were local news outlets, the most linked-to domains by tweets pushing misleading narratives about the Greenville incident are primarily conservative or otherwise right-wing partisan media outlets. Interestingly, many of the accounts and media outlets that helped provide and spread the misleading framing connecting the Glendale, CA mail-dumping incident to concerns about mail-in ballots also participated in seeding and amplifying the false narratives around this event.
Table 2: Most Tweeted Domains in the Greenville WI Mail Ditching Dataset
Right-Wing Frames were Mobilized by Conservative and Pro-Trump Twitter Influencers
The graph below plots the cumulative amount of tweets in the Greenville WI Mail Ditching Subset. Time runs left to right. The y-axis shows the total number of tweets. Individual tweets are plotted according to the total number of tweets at that time. Their shape and color reflects tweet type. And their size reflects audience size (the tweeting account’s follower count). The graph only plots tweets from accounts with more than 10,000 followers.
This link contains a large interactive version of the graph that can be explored to see tweet content and author information. Zooming in on the early propagation (lower left) reveals a number of conservative, pro-Trump and MAGA-branded accounts working to spread the article — and its misleading framing — through their networks. The narrative gets early amplification from @EricTrump (the large circle in lower left corner), and several other large-follower accounts such as @WayneDupreeShow, @TrumpWarRoom and @BreitbartNews help to sustain its spread over time.
A Right-Wing Frame Moved from Hyper-Partisan Media through Social Media Influencers to the White House and then out to the General Public
At the end of the graph, a new burst of attention to the event begins. In one of the last tweets in our dataset, media outlet @thehill (The Hill) reports statements made by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany: "Mass mail-out voting... could damage either candidate’s chances because it's a system that's subject to fraud. In fact, in the last 24 hours, police in Greenville, Wisconsin, found mail in a ditch, and it included absentee ballots."
This demonstrates how a false narrative that began in a right-wing partisan media outlet, with false claims and misleading framing about a real event, eventually made its way into more “mainstream” political discourse and out through the official White House spokesperson.
Primary Take-Aways from the Social Media Analysis
To some extent, these mail-dumping events are resonating on both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, they are tied to criticisms of the Trump administration’s management of the USPS. On the right, they are framed as evidence that mail-in ballots are insecure and they feed a predominant narrative that election results based on mail-in ballots cannot be trusted.
These frames are misleading because they suggest impacts on election results that are exaggerated or unfounded in the evidence (e.g., there were no ballots in the discarded mail in Glendale), and imply an intent that is not supported by the facts (e.g., Democratic voter fraud in the Greenville case).
Media content hosted by “mainstream” local and national media is appropriated opportunistically and framed in specific ways to generate and propagate these misleading narratives.
On the political right, this spread is facilitated by a number of hyper-partisan media outlets along with high-follower Twitter accounts of media pundits, political leaders and social media “influencers.” Some of the same outlets and accounts played a significant role in spreading misleading narratives about election integrity using evidence from both events. This suggests a pattern that we may continue to see, with concerted efforts by this network of individuals and organizations to repeatedly make these false narratives “go viral.”
At times, misleading narratives about election integrity that emerge from hyper-partisan media outlets and right-wing social media networks receive amplification by political figures and other government or campaign representatives.
What’s Next: Addressing Misleading Narratives About Mail Dumping and Election Integrity
What We Might Expect to See of These Narratives over the Next Few Months
In the coming weeks, we expect that additional cases of discarded mail — or other similar incidents that include discarded ballots — will be highlighted, exaggerated, and used to support claims that mail-in voting is insecure and that the results of the election cannot be trusted. Politically motivated individuals and organizations will reframe these events in misleading ways to imply that they are politically motivated and part of a larger pattern by one party trying to “steal” or “rig” the election. Though the two examples featured here relied on recent events, we may also see evidence from previous events may be resurfaced in misleading ways, e.g., without the context of where and when they occurred, to further these narratives. These narratives will likely resonate among conservatives and Trump supporters, receiving amplification from political leaders, social media influencers, and right-wing media. Similar narratives may also take root and spread among left-leaning social media users, through likely with different framing.
Potential Publication and Platform Remedies
News publishers and social media platforms should adopt techniques to help prevent misleading narratives which frame cases of improper mail disposal as deliberate actions or suggest that such cases will undermine the integrity of the upcoming presidential election.
Publications should revisit and update old stories on Postal Service misbehavior and clarify the date of the story in a way that will be visible to those that share it. A good example of this process is this story from NBC News.
The video in this case (below image in the series above) has been watermarked and the meta tags for sharing headlines altered to make clear its date when shared. Note the way that the Facebook-facing headline is customized here, putting the year in front to make sure that the date is not trimmed off or elided during sharing.
Facebook’s decision to alert users when they share older content (image below) is a good model of a relatively non-intrusive feature that can reduce the virality of such falsely framed events and provides a template for other platforms to follow. Platforms could consider going further and visibly tagging older information for readers as well.
Given that the amount of previous mail misbehavior events are limited, platforms might also consider scanning the use of known pictures and other media associated with previous events to make sure the material is not being falsely framed in terms of date, location or participants. Expanding monitoring to relevant foreign incidents that could be reframed as U.S. incidents would also be useful.
Increasing Awareness of How These Narratives Are Spread
Journalists and researchers can help to increase awareness for the public about how these mail dumping events are being framed in misleading ways and mobilized by politically-motivated entities to undermine trust in election integrity. One potential technique, one that we apply here, is demonstrating how these narratives take root and go viral — revealing the role played by political actors, hyper-partisan media outlets, and social media influencers who repeatedly spread politically-motivated content that functions to undermine perceptions of election integrity.
Potential Community and Online Information Literacy Remedies
Platform users and community members can play a vital role in fighting the false framing of such videos. Users should:
Check the date before sharing: Always check the date of news before sharing, and consider if the date of the news item undermines the interpretation given it. If you still want to share an old article, consider prefacing your share text with “Old article, but…” to prevent misinterpretation.
With media, such as images and videos, use the five pillars of verification. At minimum, avoid sharing photos or video unless you know who took it, and when, where, and why they took it. (Sometimes the “who” will not be traceable to a person but can be traced to a role — taken by a security camera, taken by a mail customer, taken as part of a local TV investigation). For this particular threat, checking for alteration or cutting is likely less a problem.
Correct false framing when you see it. There’s research on how to do this more effectively, but the biggest research finding is that almost any correction is better than no correction. Some points:
Keep it simple and avoid arguing.
Focus on the other people reading it, not the poster. You just want to warn others.
A simple reply noting it is an old video with a link to the original story can help. If you are not sure if the sharer intended to falsely frame it, you can acknowledge that as well, e.g., “You may know this, but this is a video from 2014 and not related to the current election. But maybe you’re making a different point? http://www. example.com/link.htm”
Corrections from friends can be useful, but stressful. It’s OK to focus on correcting strangers, particularly those with large audiences.
Tips for power-checkers: The site postal-reporter.com has logged many of the more recent mail incidents. We don’t have information on the stated owner of Postal Employee Network (Rick Owens) but stories link to reputable sources and they have been around since 1999. This sort of search may help you match a shared video or image to a historical incident if reverse image search or InVid fails. Replace “dumpster” with whatever terms might be specific to the shared media. Building a library of postal news aggregators may also be helpful.
Summary
This article lays out the ways that we have seen, and expect to continue to see, incidents involving mail dumping and other cases of discarded ballots brought into ongoing conversations about election integrity in the U.S. It features two recent cases of “mail dumping.” In both, information about a real event was framed and mobilized towards particular political objectives. On the political left, they were used to further criticisms of recent changes to the U.S. Postal Service. On the political right, they were used to foster distrust in mail-in voting, preemptively undermine faith in election results, and make unfounded claims of voter fraud by Democrats.
These efforts can be viewed as disinformation campaigns. As former practitioner and disinformation scholar Lawrence (Ladislav) Bittman explained, the best disinformation is often built around a true or plausible core. But, as we see in these cases, it is shaped and amplified in misleading ways to achieve political aims.
In this case, the campaigns to push these narratives were participatory, networked efforts that emerged from a combination of politically-active social media influencers and hyper-partisan news outlets. We can expect that these same networks will be active in pushing similar narratives over the course of the coming weeks and months.
In particular, incidents of improperly disposed mail (and ballots) are going to be a continued opportunity to sow distrust in mail-in voting and election results more generally. During the two-day period when we were writing up this blog, other incidents of discarded mail and ballots were used in misleading ways as “evidence” to support claims of election insecurity or, in some cases, fraud. We expect to continue to see these kinds of events, and encourage platforms and users to pay attention to how they can be misused to undermine election integrity.
