Letter: Fake News Warning At Election Time

Published on: 9 Apr, 2026
Updated on: 9 Apr, 2026

From Brian Creese

Member of One Guildford (described by Creese as a loose network drawn from across political parties, faith groups and civil society, monitoring and looking to combat the influence of authoritarian and hard right groups in the Guildford area).

Last summer I spent four interesting mornings at the Guildford Institute running a course on identifying “Fake News”.

One of the attendees was Dragon editor Martin Giles who brought his own experience of trying to counter fake news, often disseminated on social media.

As part of my preparation for this I opened up my social media to places I would not normally go, and I have found it is harder to get rid of these sites than I had thought.

This means I am still seeing a great number of hard right-wing posts, and I thought I would share one from the weekend with Guildford Dragon readers. It said: “…make sure you take a pen with you when voting. Because otherwise they [who “they” are was not explained] will be given a pencil and any Reform votes will be rubbed out and substituted by their votes.

As anyone who has attended an election count will know, this is laughably ludicrous – given that ballot boxes are unsealed in front of a range of official party observers (from all parties as well as independent observers) and members of the press. The same audience sees the votes sorted, reconciled with tallies from the polling stations and counted. Eagle-eyed candidates and agents scrutinise everything.

There was a similar social media claim about postal voting, talking about huge bags of votes arriving from “who knows where” stuffed with votes for “their” candidates. Once again, simply not true and again prevented by electoral processes monitored by all candidates and agents.

Those writing these posts is not, I believe, ignorant of the facts. They are deliberately peddling disinformation with the sole purpose of casting doubt on our electoral process, so when they lose they can say the result was rigged – or perhaps we should say “stolen”, since I am sure many of these posts originate in the US. Their purpose is to destroy people’s faith in democracy as a legitimate process.

It is difficult to know how to react to this nonsense. I was in the “just ignore it and it will go away” camp, but having seen how enormous this movement is, I have changed my mind. This single post was “liked” thousands of times and shared hundreds – and there are hundreds of near identical posts also circulating.

So I think it is incumbent on all of us who know how the process works to call out disinformation when we see it, or hear it, even if it might be difficult. If we do not put the actual facts out there, how can we complain if people are taken in by these lies?

However difficult it may be, we need to call out disinformation aimed at discrediting the electoral system whenever we see it, because the hard right agenda is absolutely clear. We must not allow them to win by default.

Editor’s comment: I attended Brian Creese’s interesting course as a paid up attendee without any pre-arrangement with Brian and I have no allegiance to his Labour party or any other.

In common with many journalists, I am concerned about the prevalence of fake news which has been greatly facilitated by social media.

As you might expect, I would much prefer everyone to get their news from regulated sources which, while not perfect, are far more reliable. But I do not believe fake news comes from a single area of the political spectrum and is not always as blatant as the, nonetheless, pertinent example given above, of pencilled crosses on ballot forms being erased.

Having now witnessed all (I think) of the Guildford election counts since The Guildford Dragon NEWS was established in 2012, I do share Brian’s overall confidence in the system. I used to be in favour of moving to electronic voting but having seen the way results have been challenged in the USA I now believe our paper system is more open to scrutiny and is therefore more trustworthy.

While conspiracy theories will always exist, it would take a really wide-scale subterfuge, involving many people, at different stages of the process, all working in cahoots, to significantly affect election results.