The 2024 election already has viral misinformation. 

There was a video of someone tearing up votes for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. It was a fake. Another conspiracy said Georgia voting machines were flipping votes. Also bogus. 

Finding reliable information on elections isn’t always easy, and social media is often full of lies and misinformation. Here’s how the voting and ballot-counting process work. 

For starters, listen to the experts who suggest you lean on news agencies and government election officials, not on strangers sharing jaw-dropping scenarios online. 

Where do I find accurate voting totals? 

The Beacon will have a 24/7, always updating page dedicated to all the major races in Kansas and Missouri. The Beacon uses the Associated Press for its voting information. The AP gets its vote totals straight from the source — precinct locations and county election offices. 

The AP also declares winners and losers in races. It has the calling of races down to a science after doing it longer than any of us have been alive. 

The AP doesn’t just look at vote totals and make a guess. It looks at what precincts have reported, where the remaining votes are — red or blue locations — and whether that’s enough to swing an election. 

The AP is as reliable as they come, but voters can also check the Kansas or Missouri secretaries of state websites for unofficial vote totals. 

What is an unofficial vote total? 

An unofficial vote total doesn’t mean the count is inaccurate. It means the votes have not been certified by the election board. That certification process takes weeks to complete. 

Those election offices need to wrangle slow mail ballots or provisional ballots, which is why the total is unofficial. But unofficial tallies never differ from the final amount by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of votes. 

How does vote counting work?

Polls close at 7 p.m. local time. That’s 7 p.m. Central for most of Kansas and Missouri but 7 p.m. Mountain time for a few of our far-western Kansas friends. 

Counting happens throughout the night and takes weeks for certification. Johnson County, Kansas, meets Nov. 15 to certify the results.

How do I see vote totals in my county? 

The Kansas secretary of state’s website will have unofficial vote totals during the election. You can filter election results by county.  Missouri vote totals can be sorted by county here. 

What do I do if I think I saw voter fraud?

X, formerly known as Twitter, has a whole community dedicated to sniffing out alleged voter fraud. And it didn’t take long for false videos made by the Russians to make rounds on social media and undermine confidence in our election process. 

But what do you do if you see claims of voter fraud online? Verify it two or three times over, said  Tarun Sabarwal, a professor at the University of Kansas. 

Sabarwal has studied election misinformation. He said conspiracies gain traction when they’re repeated over and over, and social media algorithms are designed to feed users content based on what they like. If you watch videos on alleged voter fraud, you’ll get more videos about voter fraud. 

Sabarwal said Kansans and Missourians should fact-check claims of voter fraud with credible sources. That’s legacy media outlets and official government agencies — not other social media influencers. 

“Relying on what you hear on social media” is a bad idea, he said. “(Such online posts) have fewer constraints on what is being posted or what is being communicated … You’re going to have a variety of things that may not necessarily be true.”

The Beacon, county election boards, and the Kansas and Missouri secretaries of state will all look into alleged voter fraud. 

Kansas can report voter fraud here. Missourians have a similar option here.