What fakes are circulating around the midterms

Fact finder After midterm elections in the USA What fakes are circulating around the midterms As of: November 7th, 2026 • 10:46 a.m

Fake news reports, manipulated voting machines and fabricated allegations against candidates: numerous false claims are spreading around the US midterms. Russian influence campaigns are partly behind this.

“It’s rigged,” says a post on X about a video that went viral in connection with the midterm elections in the USA. The video shows a woman in Cook County, Illinois, reporting that after she voted, a voting machine warned her that other voters would not normally vote for the Republican judicial candidate she had selected. "People are not typically choosing this person!" was supposedly standing there.

The video was viewed more than 1.4 million times in a posting on A narrative that was already spread for the 2024 presidential election.

But the woman's descriptions do not stand up to scrutiny. The Cook County Board of Elections says the voting machines did not display information about candidate popularity. They displayed a notice when fewer votes were cast in a ballot than possible: "This contest is undervoted!" This is intended to ensure that voters check their selection again before submitting it.

In addition, no Republican judicial candidates ran in Cook County's midterm elections, the Cook Country Clerk's office told PolitiFact.

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Another false claim questioning the legality of the election is also circulating on social networks after the US midterm elections. Several posts on Photos of an FBI operation, a warehouse and alleged election documents were shared.

However, there is no evidence of the alleged raid. The FBI expressly denied any operation in connection with the elections to the dpa. The pictures are also misleading: the FBI vehicle is from an operation in Atlanta in January 2026, the photo of the warehouse is older. The alleged fraudulent ballots are ballots that were sorted as part of early voting on October 21st in San Francisco.

Another post on "It is simply not possible for someone with the radical ideology of James Talarico to win an election in Texas fairly," it says - it is "simply impossible" for Talarico with his "radical ideology" to win an election in Texas fairly. The post looked like a still from an NBC show.

But Paxton did not make that statement. The alleged NBC image is not authentic. Instead, the Republican publicly congratulated his opponent on his election victory and admitted his defeat. Talarico won the Senate seat for Texas. This was the first time in more than 30 years that such a seat in the state went to a Democrat.

False claims like these resonate with a large portion of the U.S. population. According to a representative survey by the research company NewsGuard, 54 percent of Americans surveyed believe at least one of three false claims about the integrity of elections.

These included allegations of alleged fraud in mail-in voting, the participation of people without US citizenship in elections and alleged manipulation of voting machines via the Starlink satellite network. Only 13 percent correctly classified all three claims as false.

In a continuously updated tracker, Newsguard documented 55 false claims surrounding the midterms as of November 5th. 26 of them revolved around alleged election fraud. NewsGuard documented a total of 611 unique mentions of these claims across 12 platforms, more than 392 different social media accounts, 71 websites, and 24 national news stories. Elon Musk's Platform X accounted for 64 percent of the cases recorded.

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One possible reason for the spread of false claims is election advertising by the parties and their support organizations themselves. According to the fact-checking portal PolitiFact, election commercials were often used not only to present themselves, but also to discredit political opponents - also with the help of false claims.

There are large sums of money behind these campaigns. Nationally, political candidates and outside groups spent about $12 billion on election advertising in the run-up to the midterm elections, according to the advertising company AdImpact.

In addition to false claims that are spread for various political motives, there are also targeted foreign influence operations. Russian actors in particular have been trying to influence political debates and election campaigns in Western countries for years.

In the USA, these activities are currently evident, among other things, in manipulated or AI-generated videos that are intended to discredit the Democratic Senate candidates in the battleground states of Texas, Maine and Ohio.

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A manipulated video showed an alleged television report from the Cleveland 19 station in which four former employees accused Ohio Rep. Sherrod Brown of sexual assault. Although the video uses real footage from the station, the news anchor's voice was added later and there are no reports from the station about the allegations. One of Brown's former employees named in the video described the depiction as fictional.

Another fake video gives the impression that station WABI reported on allegations against Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson of Maine. Accordingly, Jackson is said to have threatened employees with an ax. Here, too, an artificial soundtrack was subsequently placed over real news material and there are no reports of this on the station's official channels.

Another video that has gone viral shows a man claiming to be a former student of Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. He claims that Talarico sexually abused him when he was 12 years old. But the man in the video is an AI-generated deepfake based on the appearance of Talarico's former student Zyon Lewis. Lewis denied the allegations and said the video was AI-generated. Talarico's press spokeswoman also described the allegations as baseless and false.

According to NewsGuard, the three fake videos combined received around 2.8 million views across 3,790 social media posts. The research collective Gnida Project, which has been monitoring Russian disinformation campaigns for years, and other experts attribute the videos to the Russian influence operation Storm-1516. Despite the widespread false claims, all three Democrats won the election for a Senate seat.

Numerous manipulated videos are also being spread under the hashtag #AllDemocratsAreCriminals, in which well-known Hollywood actors and other public figures appear to take a stand against the Democratic Party.

"There isn't a single child in America today who isn't being threatened by the Democrats," a vocally cloned version of "How I Met Your Mother" actress Alyson Hannigan says in a video. In another video, actress Sarah Jessica Parker allegedly calls Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a Nazi.

The recordings are fake. Experts associate the videos with the Russian-affiliated Matryoshka disinformation campaign.

Russian information manipulation around elections is now taking place on an almost “industrial scale,” says Julia Smirnova, senior researcher at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS). This is possible, among other things, through the use of artificial intelligence. AI is used from research to the mass creation of websites and content, such as deepfakes. However, many of the counterfeits are of very poor quality. “What is crucial is that they appear plausible enough to raise doubts and be disseminated by other actors.”

Russia's campaigns and attempts to influence elections affect many countries around the world. All often followed a recurring pattern and occurred in several phases, says Smirnova. First, networks of websites and social media accounts would be built. Candidates and governments that are considered more pro-European or less Russia-friendly are often discredited. At the same time, the campaigns addressed polarizing issues, brought them to a head and amplified them through coordinated networks.

Immediately before the elections, doubts about the integrity of the electoral process were increasingly being cast. The topics and specific claims are often adapted to the respective countries, explains Smirnova. "In the USA, for example, it is about non-US citizens allegedly taking part in elections illegally or about certain voting machines being manipulated; in Germany, postal voting is often particularly attacked." In an investigation into the state elections in Germany, CeMAS identified, among other things, the Russian influence operations Matryoshka, Doppelgänger and Storm-1516.

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The overarching pattern is similar across countries: "The most important goal of these attempts is to destabilize the countries concerned and undermine democratic institutions and democratic processes in these countries, and to weaken trust in the political system as a whole."

It is difficult to measure how strongly such campaigns actually influence attitudes or voting decisions. High view numbers and many posts do not automatically mean that the content reaches a large audience. “Artificial amplification can distort the range,” says Smirnova. It is therefore also crucial whether content from high-reach accounts or political actors is picked up and disseminated.