Voters arrive at a polling place in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Nov 5, 2024. More than 60% of posts discussing election fraud on X on Tuesday focused on Pennsylvania, according to an analysis of about 25,000 posts. — The New York Times
Election deniers spent the weeks leading up to Election Day sounding the alarm online about the potential for widespread voter fraud that would taint the results – something that US officials say has never occurred in modern elections. Former President Donald Trump claimed “massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia on Tuesday before the polls had even closed.
Then the results arrived, showing Trump with considerable strength. Voices that had spent years shouting about election integrity suddenly faded to a whisper.
“As soon as it started to look like Trump was going to win, the election denialism went very, very quiet,” said Welton Chang, a co-founder and the CEO of Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors fringe social networks.
The sudden hush of election deniers in the wake of Trump’s victory Tuesday underscores the narrative’s long-standing purpose as a means for Trump to regain power and challenge election results, experts say. When denying the election’s outcome suddenly proved politically useless, the influencers and Trump allies seemed content to simply set it aside.
The false notion that the 2020 election was stolen lived beyond social media as well, powering a broad movement of “election integrity” activists. For the past four years, many of them had dedicated themselves to “fixing” the voting system to prevent a future “steal” – signing on as poll watchers, election workers and even election board members.
During the voting Tuesday, several of the movement’s figures spread posts online that suggested activists were finding evidence of problems.
On Wednesday, however, one top leader portrayed Trump’s victory as a result of their work to improve the system.
“To the thousands of election integrity warriors: Thank you,” read a post on the social platform X on Wednesday from Cleta Mitchell, one of the most prominent leaders of the movement.
In an interview later Wednesday, Mitchell said the vigilance of her fellow activists had “kept a lot of the serious things that happened in 2020 from happening again.” Asked if she had a message for those who might view the acceptance of this year’s results as evidence of partisan motives, she said they needed to “get over their Trump derangement syndrome.”
On X, false claims of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania and other swing states surged early on Election Day but then appeared to peter out as the night went on, according to an analysis by the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.
On Telegram, dozens of far-right channels identified by The New York Times spent days leading up to the vote questioning its integrity and vowing to act with force if necessary to block what they viewed as a fraud. As the results rolled in, the tone shifted, warily at first and then gleefully.
“Most of our Proud Boy poll workers have returned home,” read one message posted at 6.35pm from a North Carolina chapter of the extremist group, which was involved in the Jan 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill. “Overwhelmingly they said despite what the media has told you, from what they saw, today they are confident Trump will win North Carolina.”
Another prime example of the movement’s sudden shift Tuesday night involved a problem in Milwaukee. Social feeds filled with recriminations and suspicion after elections administrators there discovered that 13 ballot tabulators had been insufficiently secured ahead of counting. Officials said they would have to retabulate 31,000 votes.
Mitchell pointed to the incident as an example of improvements brought about by her movement. “Rather than putting cardboard on the windows,” she wrote in her X post, the Milwaukee elections director “said, ‘we will recount all those ballots to be sure it is correct’.”
Seth Keshel, an election denier from Arizona who spent years touring the country with voter fraud claims, found a way to thread the needle: He said he believed Trump won fairly, but suggested there may still have been some fraud in down-ballot races where Democrats were leading.
“I believe the outcome is correct,” Keshel said in an interview. “I don’t believe that every state is right.”
On X, a channel established by Elon Musk’s political action committee lit up with similar claims Wednesday, suggesting that congressional races with Democrats in the lead were tainted by voter fraud. Some posts misleadingly pointed to spikes in vote totals as evidence, though that can happen during any election and does not indicate malfeasance.
By Wednesday morning, some of the loudest voices on X questioning the outcome of the presidential race were coming from the left, according to a review by NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation – though they were hardly to the scale of the “Stop the Steal” movements that had spread widely, with Trump’s support, after the 2020 election.
The hashtag #DoNotConcedeKamala had more than 386,406 mentions by 3pm Wednesday, NewsGuard found. Many posts repeated claims once advanced by far-right agitators, including speculation about election interference by foreign adversaries or that ballots were being somehow destroyed en masse.
“The spread is undeniable, although it hasn’t gone mainstream,” said Steven Brill, a co-founder of NewsGuard. “The most prominent examples of left-wing claims about the election being rigged are from more obscure X users.”
By noon, posts claiming that there were “missing votes” for Harris had peaked at more than 94,000 per hour, according to an analysis by PeakMetrics, an analytics company. – ©2024 The New York Times Company
