Activists are using Donald Trump’s decisive victory to further cast doubt on the 2020 election results and cast doubt on close US Senate races where ballots are still being counted.
While they have been quiet about the fraud in the presidential election this year, activists pointed to the unofficial total of votes cast and noted that 20 million more votes were cast in 2020. They ignored the reality that millions of votes were still being counted In states like California, Arizona and Nevada, they suggested that the incomplete count was somehow evidence that there were counterfeit ballots in 2020.
“Where did the 20 million votes go between 2020 and 2024? 15 million for Biden, 5 million for Trump. Who believes that Trump received 5 million fewer votes in 2024?” Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally and leader of the election denial movement, tweeted Thursday.
Abraham Hamadeh, who won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in Arizona, made a similar claim. “20 Million Missing Democratic Voters – Where Have They Gone.”
Related: Swing State voters process Trump victory with hope and fear: ‘This is a powder keg moment’
This claim is echoed by some on the left, who have wrongly suggested that there were suspiciously fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020 and that Harris should not have conceded the race.
The claims were false. When all the votes are counted, the New York Times estimates that more than 157.5 million people will have voted in the presidential election. 159.7 million ballots were counted in the 2020 election.
“Election denial has always, at its core, been an attempt to reject and undo results that election deniers don’t like,” said Ben Berwick, an attorney at the nonprofit Protect Democracy. “It is not surprising that the false narrative of non-citizen voting, the false narrative of fraud, suddenly evaporates when the preferred candidate does well, and it is also not surprising that it stays alive in races where the preferred candidate does not does good.”
Speaking from the Rose Garden on Thursday, Joe Biden said the election results should put an end to subversive efforts to cast doubt on the US election.
“I also hope that we can put to rest the question of the integrity of the American electoral system,” he said. “It is fair, honest and transparent. And you can rely on it, whether you win or lose.”
But instead of recognizing that the system works, activists focused on races other than the presidential election, especially close U.S. Senate contests where ballots are still being counted.
“So many lower-vote Republicans were taken out of a victory. Trump won by a much larger margin than reported,” tweeted David Clements, a former professor in New Mexico who has traveled around the country spreading false information about voting machines.
The delicate balance that election deniers tried to strike after the election was perhaps best summed up by Tom Fitton, a Trump ally who heads the conservative group Judicial Watch. “The theft has indeed stopped,” he tweeted Thursday morning. A few hours later, he tweeted: “What is happening now in Maricopa County is election corruption.”
Activists focused on close Senate races in Arizona and Nevada, two states where mail-in voting is widely used and votes are still counted for several days after the election. Trump is expected to win both states.
In Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democratic, overtook opponent Sam Brown in vote counting after initially trailing him. Experts have long warned that because of the way different voting methods are reported, one candidate may appear to be ahead on election night but fall behind as more votes are counted.
Robert Beadles, a prominent election denier in Nevada who has spent years questioning the election results, claimed there was something fishy going on with the count. “They flooded the system with enough illegal votes days after the election to take the lead. Will it hold…,” he wrote in a post on X on Thursday morning.
In Arizona, where Democratic Ruben Gallego narrowly leads Republican Kari Lake in the race for the U.S. Senate, election deniers have also used Trump’s victory to question how other Republicans could lose. On Thursday, 943,000 votes remained to be counted.
“You’re trying to tell me that people voted for Trump and then turned around and voted for Ruben Gallego and other Democrats at the state level?” Josh Barnett, an election denier in Arizona who supports overturning the results of the 2022 election. “There is no way this could have happened. I don’t buy it. I have told our state legislature that this is what would happen if we do not have a proper and legally conducted election. They take and “steal” what they can to gain control. Almost like a trade-off.”
Split-ticket voting – voting for one party’s candidate at the top and another party’s candidates for other offices – is not unusual in American presidential elections.
“Election denial is not actually about election integrity, and it has never been pushed in good faith. “Election denialism heading into Election Day 2024 has always been about laying the groundwork to claim fraud and overturn the results if they lose,” said Lizzie Ulmer, senior vice president for communications and strategic partnerships at States United Action, a watchdog group. “So it’s not surprising that the conspiracy narratives have gone silent around races where election deniers’ preferred candidates won. But the damage is still incredibly real: This kind of rhetoric and false claims have eroded the American people’s confidence in our system.”
Peter Bernegger, a Wisconsin activist who has harassed election officials with false claims of fraud, including filing numerous failed lawsuits against election agencies since 2020, posted on Telegram that he had filed a lawsuit against 150,000 absentee ballots in the state, noting that Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, led by 27,107 votes. “Last time I checked, 150,000 was more than 27,107,” he wrote.
Seth Keshel, an election-denying activist who touts his background as a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, also took aim at Wisconsin.
“Most fraudulent election award of 2024: congratulations, Badger State,” Keshel wrote in a message to his more than 90,000 followers on the messaging app Telegram. Keshel complained that the Milwaukee Election Commission needed to be “cleaned up,” pointing to a problem the commission faced Tuesday afternoon when election workers recounted more than 30,000 ballots after discovering that numerous tabulations had not been properly tabulated. (Bipartisan observers and the committee agreed that the error would not have affected the accuracy of the count, but decided to re-run the votes for transparency reasons).
“The same piece every year,” he wrote.
With their preferred candidate in power, Trump’s allies in the election denial movement have uniformly celebrated his victory and refused to question the results of this presidential election. Where their movement – based entirely on undermining confidence in an election their candidate lost – will go now that Trump has been elected is unclear.
Douglas Frank, an election-denying influencer who has traveled the country promoting a bunk theory about Democrats using an “algorithm” to flip 2020 votes to Biden, sees Trump’s victory as an opportunity to make up for his loss To avenge 2020.
“We are still at war,” he wrote to his followers on Wednesday morning. “War is messy. This is not the time for weak stomachs. Now we go city by city and door to door to wipe out the enemy.”
Berwick, the attorney for Protect Democracy, noted that many proponents of the stolen election idea have an incentive to perpetuate the myth.
“This election denial has made a lot of people a lot of money, and so there are people who have a financial incentive to perpetuate this division, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s some of what’s happening here as well,” he said.
Rachel Leingang contributed to the reporting
