Election Audit Groups Spread Misinformation on Telegram

TLDR

• Since the 2020 US election, alleged election fraud issues have been a topic of concern among groups of conservative voters. 

• Open Measures monitors many Telegram channels dedicated to “grassroots” attempts to fix alleged election integrity issues, many of them branding themselves as election “audit” groups. Common topics of conversation include undocumented immigrants voting in elections, mail-in voting, and Donald Trump’s court cases.

• Many of the election audit groups are dedicated to specific states, and some of the most active groups are focused on swing states. 

• There is a fair degree of overlap between these channels—they often promote the same content, including messages, URLs, and hashtags. 

• Open Measures researchers assess that these “audit” channels will remain a main source of election fraud conspiracies and disinformation ahead of the 2024 election and warrant continued monitoring.

Background 

In the aftermath of the 2020 US election, many “big lie” conspiracy theories about the election’s integrity emerged. These conspiracy theories—championed by Donald Trump and other right-wing personalities such as Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson—have gained traction with large segments of the American public.

Since then, election integrity has remained a topic of interest among conservative voters, particularly on Telegram, an app facilitating both private messaging and larger, channel-based messaging. Public channels on Telegram range from just a handful of members to hundreds of thousands. Channels are often used to exchange news, opinions, advice, and more.

Researchers at Open Measures identified a number of dedicated Telegram channels discussing how to protect the vote. These channels often perpetuate discredited theories surrounding fraud in the 2020 presidential election. One such channel has been revealed to be run by an elected official in Fulton County, Georgia.1

Many of these Telegram channels focus their efforts locally in various states around the country, while also considering national politics. Topics of interest in these channels include concerns about undocumented immigrants voting in elections, mail-in voting, and continued discredited worries about Dominion voting machines.

Donald Trump’s ongoing court cases are also a popular topic of discussion, with users mentioning key figures such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Certain non-election-related topics often appear in these chats as well, including anti-vax sentiments, pro-life conversations, and disdain for LGBTQ+ communities.

Analysis

Trend

Open Measures monitors dozens of Telegram channels dedicated to election integrity. Many of these groups use the term “audit” in their branding, with names such as “MNAuditChat” and “AudittheVoteKansasChat.” For this reason, Open Measures researchers used the following query to monitor groups of interest within our Telegram dataset: 

(channeltitle:*audit* OR channelusername:*audit*) 

The channelusername field is the username for a channel, and the channeltitle field is the colloquial “title” of a channel. To understand the relationship between these terms, channelusername and channeltitle, are analogous to a formal Twitter “handle” and the “name” of a profile, which is often the same as the individual or organization behind the handle.

On Twitter, for example, @Open_Measures is the username and “Open Measures” is the profile title. On Telegram, a similar example would be “AudittheVoteKansasChat” as the channelusername and “Audit the Vote – Kansas Chat” as the channeltitle). 

Method

Open Measures researchers traced this type of Telegram activity to as early as May 2021. However, for this analysis, Open Measures looked at the 10 most active Telegram channels dedicated to election integrity since the start of 2024. To visualize this, researchers created a chart showing message volume.

Caption: Results for the aforementioned query across Open Measures’ Telegram collections. Results show message volume since the start of 2024. 

Caption: The aforementioned query across Open Measures’ Telegram collections. Results show the top 10 most popular authors within these Telegram channels since the start of 2024. Notably, the 5th most popular author has a name representing a far-right anti-government US militia.

The top Telegram channels for this period, with the most-active channels listed first, are (full list in the appendix):

It is notable that audit groups dedicated to several swing states (Georgia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Virginia) make this list. Further, many of these channels share content from one another or from the same content creators and information outlets.

Network Analysis

Connections such as those described above—overlapping media and information spheres across Telegram groups—can be explored further using Open Measures’ Network Graph. 

Open Measures’ researchers began their analysis of these connections by taking the top channels (as measured by message volume) identified above and adding them to the Network Graph as independent nodes.

Channels of Interest

The Telegram channels of interest were: Wisconsin Election Integrity, Minnesota First Audit Chat, Audit the Vote – Kansas Chat, New Mexico Audit Force, and The People’s Audit. Rhode Island Audit Chat was excluded from this analysis due to anomalous activity levels over the past few months. 

From there, we used the Network Graph’s built-in capabilities to show us the top five hashtags, URLs, and Telegram channels mentioned within each of our five selected Telegram channels. As nodes were added, relationships between the groups became more apparent. The final graph, included below, shows connections between all five Telegram channels.

Caption: Visualization built using the Open Measures Network Graph. Researchers started with five of the most active audit-related Telegram channels, then built out from there. Light blue nodes are hashtags, darker blue nodes are Telegram channels, and orange nodes are URLs.

For readability, Open Measures researchers cleaned up the graph to leave only nodes with two or more connections.

Caption: A cleaned up version of the prior graph, leaving only nodes with more than one connection. Light blue nodes are hashtags, darker blue nodes are Telegram channels, and orange nodes are URLs.

Node Connections

Some of the overlapping connections observed between nodes were as follows: 

• The Telegram channels titled “Wisconsin Election Integrity”, “Audit the Vote – Kansas Chat”, “New Mexico Audit Force”, and “The People’s Audit” all frequently referenced the Telegram channel “Gateway Pundit,” a channel dedicated to the right-wing news site the Gateway Pundit. 

• Content posted on the “RealSKeshel” Telegram channel has been forwarded into (a form of sharing) the “New Mexico Audit Force”, “Minnesota First Audit Chat”, and “Wisconsin Election Integrity” Telegram channels. The RealSKeshel channel appears to be associated with Seth Keshel, a promoter of the “big lie.”2

• “New Mexico Audit Force”, “Audit the Vote – Kansas Chat”, and “Wisconsin Election Integrity” all shared links to a Telegram channel dedicated to Peter Bernegger, a prolific Wisconsin election denier.3

Caption: Open Measures researchers found that the audit channels had a robust message forwarding ecosystem, with the main content producers being the more generic channels like “AmericasAuditForce”, “AmericafirstAudits”, “thepeoplesaudit” and “ElectionFraud20_org”. The above graph shows channel nodes with edges representing message forwards across the channels.

Caption: A popular hashtag appearing in these channels is “auditall50states”. The most common hashtag to appear along side it is a QAnon saying “wwg1wga”.

Lastly, by using network graph analysis, Open Measures researchers observed that the types of content produced by these channels varied. It spanned from “QAnon” content to posts directing users off-platform to sites associated with the vote audit campaign. Future work would require doing registrar analysis of the URLs/domains posted in these channels.

Conclusion

Election “audit” groups on Telegram often share similar content and concerns about elections. Open Measures will continue to monitor election-related chatter within alt-tech communities in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election in the US. If you have suggestions for Telegram channels you would like to see added to Open Measures’ collections, take a look at our crawl request feature or reach out to our team directly.

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Appendix

Story table query: 

channelusername (“AuditWI” OR “MNAuditChat” OR “AudittheVoteKansasChat” OR “RIAuditChat” OR “NewMexicoAuditForce” OR “thepeoplesaudit” OR “AmericasAuditForce” OR “AuditKentucky” OR “GAelectionaudit” OR “AuditTheVoteKansas” OR “auditva”)

Full table query:

1. Chidi, G. (2024, April 18). Exclusive: Georgia lawmaker runs secret election-conspiracy telegram channel. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/18/fulton-county-telegram-election-conspiracy-bridget-thorne. ↩︎

2. Parks, M., Mollenkamp, A., & McMillan, N. (2022, June 30). Election deniers have taken their fraud theories on tour – to nearly every State. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1107868327/trump-election-fraud-jan-6. ↩︎

3. Herman, A. (2024, April 27). How one Wisconsin man plagued election offices and stoked mistrust. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/27/peter-bernegger-wisconsin-election-denier ↩︎

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