It's been a while since I've seen a good perception vs. reality study among American voters, but information veracity rating service NewsGuard just dropped one ahead of the midterm elections and it found that 54% of Americans surveyed earlier this month believe at least one of three big false election claims.
The three false claims -- that mail in voting leads to voter fraud (36.8% believe it's true), non-citizens vote regularly (30.6%), and that Elon Musk's Starlink rig's voting voting machines (14.0%) -- are interesting because they are easily provably false, but when it comes to politics, beliefs often outweigh facts.
You can read the NewsGuard analysis here and I recommend you do, because it also explores some of the root causes of the misperceptions, including Russian influence campaigns, as well as new, secretly partisan bogus "pink slime" sites posing as legitimate news organizations.
While NewsGuard doesn't delve into the influence of questionable reporting by established news outlets, I miss some of the analyses released by Ipsos' political tracking team leading up to big elections, especially the ones comparing the false beliefs of respondents based on the news outlets they use to stay informed. You can read one I covered in 2020 here, and you can see the results of one I published just after the 2024 presidential election below.
But feel free to infer what the false election claim believers are reading and watching among bona fide news outlets if you want.
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