Claims that ineligible persons will be allowed to vote are one of the most common types of disinformation that circulates around elections.

Bad actors may falsely allege that deceased persons are included in voter rolls, or that people will use the IDs of deceased persons to vote, in attempts to defraud the election.

In some cases, deceased persons may appear on voter rolls due to errors in registration; authorities are usually able to correct these errors. In other cases, individuals may pass away between the time the voter rolls are created and the election date. Countries’ electoral systems typically include methods to address this problem, as well.

For example, during the 2022 general elections in Costa Rica, the government permitted voters to use expired identity cards at the polls due to the pandemic. Disinformation claimed that this would allow thousands of deceased people to vote. To the contrary, the electoral roll was in fact updated up until the day of the election to remove the names of those who had passed away.

Another example occurred in Peru, where a video circulated during the country’s 2021 elections which showed an electoral act that was supposedly signed by a deceased person. This was a typing error, however: the user had simply entered the last digit of the identity card incorrectly.

[Read more: Combating disinformation around Nigeria's 2023 election]

False narratives around ineligible voters typically target marginalized communities, and often use...

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