Pennsylvania bombarded with disinformation on Election Day

False information surrounding the election, and particularly mail-in voting, has been at its worst in Pennsylvania.

The media insights company Zignal Labs has tallied more than 1.1 million instances of misinformation regarding mail-in voting in the past two months leading up to the 2020 election. Nearly a quarter of those instances have happened in the key state of Pennsylvania, The New York Times reports.

Among some of the earlier mentions of misinformation included reports that a small number of military ballots were thrown out in Luzerne County, with some of them allegedly marked for President Trump. The ballots were found quickly after they were discarded and the contractor who tossed them was fired. But like he had with other false claims of mail-in voter fraud, Trump and his allies inflated the story into evidence the election was rigged against him.

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The misinformation didn't stop on Election Day, where as soon as 7 a.m., a false report of election malfeasance was already swirling. A Trump campaign staffer posted a photo of Democratic campaign posters purportedly hung outside a Pennsylvania polling place, alleging it was breaking rules against posting campaign material too close to the polls, BuzzFeed News reports. The Philadelphia district attorney decried the tweet as "disinformation" a few hours later. But it had already fueled a meme suggesting Democrats were trying to "steal the election" in the swing state, and right-wing media outlets and social media personalities such as Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. sent it swirling across the internet, Vice News reports.

Toward the end of election day, the American Civil Liberties Union said it had received no reports of voter intimidation around the U.S. so far. Kathryn Krawczyk