Renee DiResta for The Atlantic:

After watching such rumors spread this week—and hundreds of other viral rumors spread during the 2020 election—I’m struck by how familiar, how predictable, the rumor story lines have become. Before the 2020 election, a rash of what we call “Discarded Ballots” rumors swept across social media. In mid-September, a reader of the conservative website The Gateway Pundit claimed to have photographed some ballot envelopes in a Dumpster in Sonoma, California. Also that month, news outlets reported on mail trays in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. Around the same time, nine discarded ballots were found in a garbage can in Scranton, Pennsylvania. These reports produced no evidence of fraud—the Sonoma ballot envelopes were from 2018 and were empty; investigations of the other two incidents yielded no charges—but Discarded Ballots is a powerful trope. In political rumors, the same plot elements and character archetypes recur with minor variation from incident to incident—to the point that conspiracy buffs should realize they’re watching the same show again and again and again….

Partisan influencers are the showrunners of online political theater. They know which plot devices please their crowd most, what blend of familiarity and novelty will sustain the most interest, and what rhetoric will persuade the most followers to amplify the story to other people. An influencer who tweets a photo of a black suitcase outside a polling place on Election Day can frame it as “found ballots” (being delivered to secretly help a particular candidate) or “stolen ballots” (being spirited away to disenfranchise another candidate’s supporters), depending on what’s more useful. They can speculate aloud, just asking questions: Is anyone looking into what’s in that suitcase? Adding an element of implied blame or conspiracy—The other side must be behind it—ramps up the potential for moral or partisan outrage, and creates a villain to rail against on social media.