How relevant is voter fraud to the 2024 election? Here’s what the audience data shows
Though no votes have yet been cast in the 2024 US presidential election, if the 2020 race is any indication, voter fraud will be a topic of interest for both candidates and voters in this cycle as well.
In our previous election-related coverage, we analyzed the topics driving the election, what swing state audiences are reading, and much more at our new Election Headquarters.
In this installment, we’ll narrow our focus to articles related to voter fraud to see how audiences are engaging with this content, which topics and keywords are most often covered alongside it, and how the candidates themselves affect readership.
How do election audiences find content about voter fraud?
Like most election topics, visitors reading about voter fraud are more often coming from another article on the same site rather than an external source like a search engine or social platform. When they’re coming from off-site channels, external sources like news aggregators are the highest referrer in terms of percentage of pageviews, followed by search and social sources.
In terms of site category, these articles most often fall within “Crime and Law,” “Politics,” and “Media and Entertainment,” the last perhaps a nod to the questionable veracity of some of the claims.
Average Engaged Time low for external sources
In addition to sending the most traffic, internal referrals are also the most engaged cohort, followed by search and then social. External traffic, while accounting for the second most amount of traffic, is actually the least engaged cohort, a sign that these article pages need further optimization to take advantage of traffic from sources like news aggregators.
In general, the topic of voter fraud has an Average Engaged Time of 48 seconds. This is on the higher end of the spectrum for election topics, and like most, it fluctuates with breaking news. In April, for example, when the Republican National Committee announced an election integrity campaign, all traffic sources saw a spike in engagement (though not all saw a proportionate increase in traffic).
Loyal visitors read more
Loyal users account for the majority of visits on this topic at 44%. This is about 2.5X the pageviews of new new users, which is in line with network-wide loyalty trends. Returning users fall in the middle at 27%.
When we look at engagement by visitor type, loyal visitors are the most engaged at about 50 seconds, followed by returning at 46 seconds and new at 43 seconds. Whereas traffic from these visitor types has remained steady over the past year, Average Engaged Time has fluctuated, most recently falling for all three categories after a spike in April.
How do Trump and Biden influence readership?
While election audiences may have a vested interest in voter fraud in and of itself, it’s impossible to decouple it from the election taking place in the background. To understand how content consumption differs in relation to candidate mentions, we also analyzed the keywords in these articles.
Across the Chartbeat network, about 80% of articles on voter fraud feature Donald Trump. When we look at unique mentions of key candidates, he features prominently in over 20,000 articles, and is the most frequently mentioned person or topic by a large measure.
Joe Biden, by contrast, is only mentioned in about a quarter of the articles on this topic. When we compare Trump plus Republican keywords to Biden plus Democratic keywords, the difference grows, showing that this issue is solidly aligned with the former president and his party.
Key takeaways from the research
As you might have expected, voter fraud is primarily covered in its relation to Donald Trump and his campaign. As with other topics that blend politics and crime, it keeps election audiences engaged, especially in the wake of breaking news, but there are some nuances to be aware of in order to get the most out of this topic. Here are our key takeaways from the research:
- Though external sources create a lot of traffic for this topic, these visitors are less engaged than those from other sources, a sign that it may be time to pitch other political topics to news aggregators.
- Articles in the Crime, Law, and Justice category get more pageviews, but when voter fraud is contextualized within the category of Politics, readers are more likely to recirculate to additional articles.
- Articles that mention Trump tend to be more engaging. When it comes to Recirculation, however, articles referencing Biden actually lead readers deeper into a site at a rate of 25% to 16%. This is consistent with what we uncovered in our swing state analysis.
- Donald Trump has cornered the market on voter fraud coverage. His name is a keyword for the vast majority of articles on the topic while Joe Biden has about a quarter of the mentions.
Teresa Mondria of Chartbeat’s Data Science team contributed research to this article.
