Since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, a vocal subset of his supporters have been shouting online about the specter of voter fraud.
On Tuesday night, however, as Trump’s 2024 victory came into focus, the noise died down. According to reports by The New York Times and Washington Post, social media accounts associated with election denial decided that, actually, everything was in working order. Thanks to their efforts, of course.
“Shoutout to you all for keeping this election from being stolen this year, you are all heroes!“ one member of X’s “Election Integrity Committee” wrote.
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Speaking to the Times, Cleta Mitchell—an Oklahoma politician turned Trump activist—said the movement’s “election integrity warriors” “kept a lot of the serious things that happened in 2020 from happening again.”
What they think happened in 2020 is that widespread-yet-ambiguous fraud at the polls allowed Democrats to “steal” the election from Trump and hand it to Joe Biden. There‘s no truth to this claim nor evidence to support it, all 50 governors having certified their states’ results in the weeks after the election was called.
Nonetheless, denial has thrived online, and continued to do so well into Election Day this time around.
On X, posts about malfunctioning voting machines in Pennsylvania—a swing state with 19 electoral votes, which Trump and Democratic opponent Kamala Harris both singled out for special attention—peaked at 658 posts per minutes around 1:20 p.m., before falling steadily as the results came in. That’s according to the Times, which noted similar trends on Telegram, a messaging app popular on the far right.
“As soon as it started to look like Trump was going to win, the election denialism went very, very quiet,” Welton Chang, whose company—Pyrra Technologies—monitors alt social networks, told the Times. Suddenly, Trump wasn’t complaining about “cheating” in Philadelphia anymore.
All of which suggests the claim was only ever a conspiracy designed to undermine a Democratic victory and bolster Trump’s bid to challenge the results. In case that wasn’t already clear.
Both the Post and the Times note that, on the left, there was a bump in skepticism over the 2024 election’s outcome, which hasn’t really gained a foothold—chiefly because Democratic leaders, Kamala Harris included, have accepted the results.
On the right, election deniers will attribute the largely smooth functioning of the nation’s voting systems to their vigilance, rather than concerted efforts by poll workers who volunteer year after year.
But the process was not entirely without hiccups: the usual margin of human error, plus several bomb threats called in at polling stations in several blue-voting swing state districts. These appear to have come from Russia, and don’t seem to be of huge concern to the “election integrity” activists. If anything, some appear to be blaming the hoax on Democrats, allegedly another installment in the plot to disqualify Trump.
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