2026 Midterms: An Election Campaign Marked by an Avalanche of Misinformation

Accusations of electoral fraud, campaign videos generated by artificial intelligence, lying attacks against candidates... The midterm elections are set to begin Tuesday in the United States, and false information is multiplying on social media.

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D-1 before the midterm elections in the United States. American voters are called to the polls on Tuesday, November 3, to renew a large part of the two chambers that make up Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The midterms also encompass a multitude of local elections and an election campaign marked by an avalanche of false information.

"Public opinion has changed": in New York, Democratic voters are betting on a popular turnaround against Donald Trump in the midterm elections

On social media, there have notably been many accusations of so-called electoral fraud: electronic voting machines that allegedly alter votes, voters reportedly paid by Democrats, or unverified IDs. The myth of the rigged election is the topic that generated the most misleading content during this midterm campaign, according to a study by NewsGuard, an American misinformation tracking organization.

Fraud accusations relayed by Elon Musk and Donald Trump

There is, for example, this video posted on TikTok by a voter leaving a polling place in New York. She is among the nearly 48 million Americans who voted early. "They gave me two ballots, and on one of them, there wasn't even the list of all the candidates," she claims in this video. "They just erased the names of the Republican Party and the Conservative Party. I swear on my life. Are you going to let them trick you like this? Wake up!" In reality, one of the two ballots was for local elections where there simply were no Republican or Conservative candidates.

These accusations of fraud are massively relayed on X by the platform's owner himself, Elon Musk, but also on Donald Trump's accounts, as well as on conservative podcasts and television.

ChatGPT, Gemini... Conversational AIs also relay false information

What has also marked this campaign are clips created with AI. These are videos under one minute long that borrow the style of TV series. In each instance, the hero or heroine is a Democratic candidate, such as Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is accused of having had plastic surgery. He denied it, but the Republican camp continues to attack him over his cosmetic expenses. Another target of these deceptive ads funded by pro-Republican groups is Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, falsely accused of wanting the destruction of the State of Israel.

False information is also being relayed by conversational AIs. As in France, prior to making their choice, more and more voters are asking an AI (Gemini, Claude, or DeepSeek). However, when it comes to the midterms, they are not very reliable. According to a study by the startup Forum AI, 40% of responses provided by conversational AIs contained at least one factual error. During the test, chatbots attributed statements to candidates that they never made, got their professional backgrounds wrong, and provided incorrect information regarding the mail-in voting deadline.

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