AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Pro-Trump social media influencers are claiming that last Tuesday's mayoral election in Los Angeles was riddled with fraud. There's no evidence of wrongdoing in that race, just slow vote counting. But influencers have been citing odds on prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket to reinforce their claims. And some of those same influencers are also being paid by those companies for promotion and visibility. Now, Kalshi says it's asking some influencers to take their posts down. Joining us to explain all of this is NPR's Jude Joffe-Block. Welcome.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: Hi, good morning.
RASCOE: So what's in these posts that Kalshi is asking influencers to take down?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, one of the influencers involved in this is a prominent Trump-aligned commentator named David Freeman. He posts under the handle Gunther Eagleman. And here's a recent video of his.
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DAVID FREEMAN: Let's talk about California for a second. You know they're cheating. I know they're cheating. You know they're cheating. We all know they're cheating.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Now, the thing is, Freeman also has a paid partnership with Kalshi. He boosts the company's social media posts to his audience of over a million followers, and those posts are basically intended to draw people to bet on the site. Freeman is rooting for former reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the LA mayor's race, and he shared a Kalshi post that showed Pratt's odds of making it to the runoff election had been falling on the betting site. Freeman added commentary that said, is California cheating to get Spencer Pratt out? And that post had a paid partnership logo on it, which means he's getting paid for it by Kalshi.
My colleague, Bobby Allen, asked Kalshi about that post, and others like it from other influencers they have partnerships with. Kalshi got back to us on Friday afternoon and told us they were asking Freeman and other influencers who have made similar posts to take them down because they violated their policies.
RASCOE: Kalshi's rival site is polymarket. What do we know about how they are handling posts like these?
JOFFE-BLOCK: We never heard back from Polymarket, which operates mostly offshore and is less regulated. But there are a number of influencers with Polymarket partnerships who are also sowing doubt about the LA mayoral election while promoting Polymarket, and those posts are still up. And I should say, there's not been evidence of misconduct in this election. But one kind of allegation we're seeing is people pointing to changes in betting market odds on prediction sites to try and suggest those fluctuations and those graphs are some kind of evidence of something suspicious when they just reflect betting behavior.
RASCOE: President Trump has also made unfounded fraud allegations about California's election, focused in on how long it's taking to count the votes. Why is the vote count so slow in California?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, yeah, here in California, everyone gets a mail ballot, and this election, a lot of people held on to their ballots until the last day. And the process for verifying those vote-by-mail ballots take longer than those cast in person. Also historically, the ballots that get counted later in the process skew more democratic, and that's been a source for conspiracy theories for years now. But those kinds of explanations rarely get the same kind of attention online as allegations of fraud.
You know, and there's also an extra layer of potential confusion when it comes to posts about races on prediction markets because these posts announce that a candidate's odds have fallen to 8% or surged to 72%. And they're talking about the betting market odds of whether someone will win or lose, not what the actual ballot count says, but not everyone is understanding that.
RASCOE: Obviously, we have midterm elections where control of Congress is coming up in a few months. What does this tell us about how those elections might be contested?
JOFFE-BLOCK: It's not looking great. I spoke with Stephen Richer, who was the Maricopa County recorder in Arizona in the aftermath of the 2020 election and dealt with a lot of false claims about election fraud that cycle. He's very worried about what the LA election means for the rest of the year.
STEPHEN RICHER: I think we're going to get punched in the face so badly on election denialism in November.
JOFFE-BLOCK: He said the election denial movement has been able to normalize itself in recent years, and one sign of that could even be that these prediction market sites are so far happy to partner with influencers whose brands have been tied to trying to delegitimize elections that were not favorable to Trump.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Jude Joffe-Block. Jude, thank you so much for joining us.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Thank you.
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