Some Wisconsin voters received inaccurate information in the mail. The response may be a sign of the times.

Last week, some Wisconsin voters began receiving postcards reminding them to vote in an upcoming election.

The notes were backing Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate in the high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court race. They briefly described her background and encouraged voters to head to the polls.

The problem? The postcards gave the wrong date. The actual election takes place on Tuesday, April 1. The postcards said it was 10 days later — on a Friday.

The wrong information most likely stemmed from a misunderstanding, when out-of-state volunteers, following a script from an advocacy group, misread an exclamation point as the number one. That would change “April 1!” to “April 11.”

But the explosion of concern on Reddit and other social media platforms was enough to motivate a response, and a caution, from the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Researchers who specialize in information say it points to a broader mistrust among voters, exacerbated by heightened political polarization.

“We often see all kinds of rumors before a high-stakes election emerge because of confusion about when, where, or how to vote. This is a very common election rumoring trope,” said Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.

“In recent years — where there can be a lot of different mistrust of each team against the other, or of the election system itself — it can spawn a lot of rumors in many different directions about the intentionality” behind a misinformation campaign, she added.

The mistaken information likely stemmed from a script shared by Activate America, which organizes handwritten postcard campaigns in support of liberal policies and candidates, according to Ronnie Cohen, the group’s director. Cohen said the script given to volunteers has since been changed.

“This was likely an innocent mistake by a couple of volunteers who confused an exclamation point with the number one,” Cohen said. “We are trying to reach out with a correction and an apology to folks who received a postcard with the wrong date.”

Nick Ramos, who heads the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a watchdog group, told reporters Monday that his group is attempting to track down how widespread the issue is.

“Human error happens on postcards,” Ramos said. “So on one hand, you want to give people the benefit of the doubt. But we are tracking it.”

Ramos said his group wants to be able to “stomp out” groups who are deliberately trying to confuse people into missing the election, and would decide soon whether it was necessary to file a complaint in this case.

The concern that bubbled up on social media about the postcards “says a lot about the times we live in,” said Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who researches political rumors.

“This is a narrative that people have heard about, right?” he said. “People who are looking for conspiracy can very easily find one.”

But it’s not surprising for voters to be on edge, he added — especially in a swing state like Wisconsin, where campaigns are often heated, expensive and draw national attention and involvement.

“Even if something were to be sort of an honest mistake … people can dig into it and find nefarious motives and kind of run with that,” he said.

On Friday, the Wisconsin Election Commission said in a press release that voters should be exercise care when reviewing third-party campaign communications.

“Voters should be cautious about any unofficial voting-related communications – including text messages, emails, mailers, phone calls, robocalls, postcards, and more — from unfamiliar sources,” WEC wrote. “They often use outdated, incomplete, or simply inaccurate data that they communicate to voters.”

WEC encouraged voters to verify all information by visiting MyVote.wi.gov.

Early voting in the race between Crawford, a Dane County judge, and conservative candidate Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge, began Tuesday. That campaign has attracted national attention and broken spending records.

The state superintendent race and a referendum about enshrining the state voter ID law in the Wisconsin Constitution are also on the ballot, and some communities also have local races.

Political misinformation heightens voter mistrust

Tomson, the University of Washington researcher, said that some high-stakes elections have seen more malicious actors spreading bad voting information. In the 2016 presidential race between President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, for example, a social media influencer encouraged Democratic voters to vote via text message.

In all 50 states, votes can only be cast at a polling place or with a certified absentee ballot. The influencer behind that campaign was sentenced to prison time.

But sometimes, Tomson said, well-intentioned actors can spread bad information, too. Last fall, officials in Stamford, Connecticut, mistakenly sent out postcards with wrong polling location information.

The intention behind misinformation isn’t always clear. In November, a Republican running for Congress from Michigan ran an ad in a Black-owned newspaper with the wrong election date. Black state lawmakers there said the candidate may have been attempting to mislead a group of voters that leans disproportionately Democratic.

And in 2020, a nonprofit founded by a former Democratic operative, was taken to task by multiple states for sending incorrect voter registration information to potentially hundreds of thousands of voters.

Wisconsin isn’t a stranger to voter confusion, either. Last spring, Siri, the digital assistant that comes standard on Apple devices, gave the correct date for the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, but not for the Republican presidential primary.

Whether intentional or not, misinformation like that “might breed more mistrust between voters and the political system generally,” said Tomson. “But that’s why we have to remind ourselves that not every mistake is nefarious, and that a lot of mistakes have remedies.”