By the time the polls opened on Election Day, unfounded claims of voter fraud had been building for months on social media, fuel doubts about the integrity of the elections.
Posts spread on And at 4:30 p.m. on Election Day, former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that there was “a lot of talk about massive cheating” in Pennsylvania — which officials said was the case.no factual basis whatsoever.”
But as votes were counted and it became clear that Trump was on his way to a decisive victory, the flood of messages questioning the integrity of the election fell apart, researchers say.
“I think this shows that these narratives are pushed when they serve a purpose, and that they often set the stage for attempts to challenge unfavorable outcomes,” said Max Read, senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “And once that stage setting and those claims are no longer necessary, they are no longer pushed.”
The shift was stark Elon Musk’s “Election Integrity Community,” a group of nearly 65,000 people created by the platform owner’s political action committee that encourages members to report “voter fraud or irregularities.”
The group had already become a repository for it speculations and unfounded rumors before election day. As polls opened, hundreds of posts were shared per hour until early Wednesday morning, when the race for Trump was called in Pennsylvania, all but eliminating the winning path for Vice President Kamala Harris.
After that, posting dropped off dramatically.
Read’s team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue also found that platform mentions of voting machines in Pennsylvania and Michigan soared Tuesday afternoon, but had dropped to barely any by Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday morning, a software glitch made voting machines temporarily unavailable in Cambria County, a county in southwestern Pennsylvania with a population of about 131,000. Voters used paper ballots and a court order extended voting hours from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. But some on social media baselessly suggested that the technical glitches were something nefarious: a plot to throw out votes in a county that Trump won by wide margins in both of the last elections. two elections.
Danielle Lee Tompson, who leads the Center for an Informed Public’s research on election rumors at the University of Washington, said the story surrounding Pennsylvania’s voting machines mirrored the conversation about election issues in Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2022 In that election, some ballots were printed with ink that was too light to be read by tabulators, so they were placed in a secure box and counted separately at state election headquarters. Claims that the errors were intentional have led to a court case disputing the results which were later rejected.
“On Election Day, we can always expect that there will be irregularities, disruptions or problems at polling stations,” Tompson said. “The question is whether these issues will be distorted into a larger narrative that election fraud is taking place.”
Although the number of election rumors has decreased dramatically, false claims about races that have not yet been called are still spreading. In Arizona, where Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake is trailing Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego, social users on the right are using the fact that Gallego had more votes than Harris on Friday to cast doubt on the validity of his lead.
Meanwhile, turnout figures are being distorted by both left and right to cast doubt on the election results. While millions of votes are still being counted, some point to higher turnout in 2020 as evidence that there are 20 million “missing votes.” On the right, some claim this is proof that 2020 was stolen from Trump; on the left, some say this is grounds for a recount.
But the number of posts questioning Harris’ loss did not come close to matching the “Stop the Steal” efforts that followed Trump’s 2020 election loss, according to both Tompson and Read’s research. None some elected officials are questioning the election denial outcome when he lost in 2020. Harris urged all Americans to accept the outcome of the election in her speech. concession speech on Wednesday.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the outcome,” Harris said. “And anyone who seeks the public’s trust must respect that.”
