On Friday, a viral claim that Pennsylvania had 21,000 dead people on its voter rolls spread across the internet. In some versions of the rumor, those deceased people had voted for the Democratic presidential candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Breitbart News, the right-wing publication, wrote an article about it. Others then cited it as evidence that Democrats were trying to steal the election.

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, shared the article on Twitter, collecting 74,800 likes and shares. Diamond and Silk, the popular pro-Trump social media duo, posted about the rumor on Facebook. And Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, tweeted: “The dead vote appears to have swung overwhelmingly for Joe Biden.”

Altogether, Facebook posts about the rumor reached up to 11.3 million people, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

The problem: It wasn’t true that 21,000 dead people had voted in Pennsylvania.

The claim stemmed from a lawsuit that was amended on Thursday, an action that fueled the rumor’s spread on Friday. The conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation had filed the lawsuit against Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, on Oct. 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

The suit accuses Ms. Boockvar, a Democrat, of improperly including 21,206 supposedly deceased Pennsylvanians on voter rolls. The group asked for an injunction to stop the dead people from voting in the election.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/technology/dead-voters-pennsylvania.html

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