In 2020, FiveThirtyEight published a chart that was weaponized to spread election disinformation. It still haunts me.

The morning after Election Day in 2020, FiveThirtyEight — the now-defunct political data site, where I worked at the time as a politics writer — published a chart on our liveblog. Within hours, it was being circulated online as supposed proof of election fraud, detached from its context and used to fuel conspiracy theories. It has haunted me ever since.

The chart showed the vote totals over time for Wisconsin. At first glance, it appeared that Joe Biden was lagging far behind Donald Trump and then suddenly surged ahead to a tie. Almost immediately, people online seized on the image, claiming that all those Biden votes were actually evidence of fraud. In fact, it was nothing of the sort, and both Trump and Biden’s votes had increased — the result of a large batch of absentee and mail ballots being counted all at once.

“I remember panicking,” said Laura Bronner, who was FiveThirtyEight’s quantitative editor at the time and made the chart. (Bronner is now a senior applied scientist at the Public Policy Group and Immigration Policy Lab in Zurich.) “I remember having conversations about, ‘What do we do given that this is being misinterpreted?’”