How US election fraud claims changed with Trump's victory

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Donald Trump addressed his supporters early Wednesday after the election results became clear.

In the run-up to Tuesday's US election, claims of voter fraud flooded social media – but as Donald Trump's victory crystallized, the chatter largely died down.

The complaints have not completely stopped, however. A number of right-wing influencers and organizations spreading stories of cheating and rigged voting pointed to incomplete vote totals and continued to repeat discredited theories about the 2020 election.

And disappointed Democratic Party supporters have developed their own baseless voter fraud theories, some of which have gone viral on X, formerly Twitter, and other platforms.

The reach of these posts pales in comparison to the deluge of content that circulated following Trump's defeat in the 2020 election.

And without the support of losing candidate Kamala Harris or other Democratic Party officials, the chances appear slim that a large-scale movement will develop along the lines of the Stop the Steal campaign four years ago, which succeeded to a riot at the US Capitol.

How did fraud complaints evolve on Election Day?

The BBC tracked a huge wave of pre-election fraud allegations that continued throughout polling day and into the evening.

These included claims that the vote was stolen in some key states, with exaggerated versions of real events used in some cases to support the allegations.

Early on Election Day in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, a Republican stronghold, problems arose with voting machines malfunctioning. The issues have been resolved and voting hours in affected areas have been extended.

However, many netizens immediately used the story to suggest nefarious activities were taking place.

A message posted at 8:45 a.m. local time on Tuesday read: Election theft is happening!

More rumors spread in posts that appeared throughout the day, including one around 2 p.m. that ballots in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, had been pre-marked for Kamala Harris.

In Milwaukee, the largest city in the swing state of Wisconsin, election officials made the decision to restart about 30,000 ballots out of an abundance of caution after doors on the back of voting machines were left open .

When the count was complete, it showed that support for Harris had declined compared to that for Joe Biden four years earlier.

Like many pro-Trump posters, Harris supporters pointed to real but isolated events — ballot box fires in Washington and Oregon, and a series of false bomb threats that disrupted voting at several precincts. votes on election day – as evidence of voter fraud.

However, there is no evidence that these incidents significantly changed the vote or the outcome.

Several posts from Democratic Party activists questioning the result went viral and were seen by millions of people on X and other platforms.

Pam Keith, a Harris supporter in Florida, posted: Is it possible that the machines were hacked to switch the counts from Harris to Trump? His message has been seen more than a million times on X, according to the site's statistics. The BBC has contacted her for comment.

However, unlike Trump's 2020 campaign, Harris' campaign and senior Democratic Party officials have not endorsed allegations of cheating or election fraud.

On Election Day, rumors of fraud also came from President-elect Trump himself, who has repeatedly claimed since the beginning of his political career that the electoral system was unfairly biased against him.

Just after 4:30 p.m., Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social: Lots of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. The police are arriving!!!

The current president-elect gave no details and Philadelphia police told BBC Verify they did not know what Trump was referring to.

Republican Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein posted on X: “There is absolutely no truth to this allegation. This is yet another example of misinformation. Voting in Philadelphia was safe .”

Trump has not repeated his allegations of fraud since Election Day.

We contacted several extremely influential accounts that regularly posted allegations of voter fraud in the run-up to the vote, but none of them responded.

With data company NodeXL, the BBC tracked accounts that interacted with Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Lara Trump and Elon Musk on Day X of Election Day.

Posts mentioning voter fraud peaked at 3:00 p.m. EST on November 5, but then declined significantly that evening and the next day as polls closed and results came in. .

Complaints continue to circulate

However, some organizations and activists that have promoted claims of election fraud in the past have continued to repeat debunked rumors even after the results became clear.

Emerald Robinson, a former right-wing TV journalist and pro-Trump influencer with over 750,000 followers on voting machines were rigged!

More broadly, the reaction from pro-Trump groups and influencers who previously raised allegations of voter fraud has varied — from silence on the issue to continued insistence that the 2020 vote was tainted by fraud .

The BBC has contacted Ms Robinson for comment.

EPA

A discouraged Kamala Harris supporter. Some Democratic Party supporters spread claims without evidence in the wake of Harris' defeat.

Conspiracy theories based on the number of votes

In another case, a chart widely circulated online purported to show a sharp drop in vote totals in 2024 compared to 2020.

Many view these figures as evidence of fraud.

Conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza, a Trump supporter who pushed theories of voter fraud, posted the day after the election: “Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024. Does anyone really believe that Biden got 80 million in 2020? are the voters leaving? The truth is that they never existed. »

However, the chart and numbers circulating online were based on preliminary vote totals, which continue to rise while final results are still being tabulated.

Harris already has more than 69 million votes in her column, compared to more than 73 million for Trump. As of Friday, fewer than two million ballots had yet to be counted nationwide, in states including Arizona and California, according to Reuters.

The BBC has contacted Mr D'Souza for comment.

Those same numbers also fuel the conspiracy theories of Harris supporters, who wonder where their absentee voters are — and ignore the fact that turnout rates and preferences change frequently, often dramatically, between elections.

Supporters on both sides also point to differences in the voting records of Harris and other Democrats running for Senate seats.

But it is not mandatory for American voters to support candidates from only one party, and ticket splitting – voting for candidates from different parties in different races – although becoming rarer, is quite common in politics American.

The University of Florida Election Lab's turnout tracker shows a slightly lower turnout rate in 2024 compared to 2020 — 62.5% versus just over 66%.

Additional reporting by Shayan Sardarizadeh and Merlyn Thomas

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