Right up to Election Day, Donald Trump and his backers were issuing unfounded warnings of voter fraud. But once his decisive victory took shape, the flood of misinformation slowed to a trickle.
Experts said the shift points to what opponents have long argued was Trump’s preemptive deployment of fraud claims in case he lost, setting the stage for him to challenge the results as he did in the 2020 election.
A sharp example came toward the end of voting on Tuesday, when officials in the largest city of must-win Pennsylvania had to quickly deny Trump’s unfounded claim that police were responding to “massive cheating” in Philadelphia.
Those were the latest doubts the ex-TV star raised about election fraud. But the false accusations go all the way back to his rejection of the 2020 results that ultimately led to his supporters trying to violently undo President Joe Biden’s poll win.
“As soon as the vote came in swinging their way, Republicans stopped making claims of election fraud late Tuesday, proving yet again it was all a grift,” Philip Mai, co-director of the Toronto-based Social Media Lab, told AFP.
The drop was particularly noticeable among members of the “Election Integrity Community,” a group on X started by Elon Musk’s America PAC, which encouraged its some 65,000 members to report irregularities.
When the polls opened on November 5, the group shared over 1,000 posts an hour, according to data collected by the nonprofit National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC).
The pace had fallen dramatically by the time the race was called for Trump in some crucial swing states early on November 6, blocking viable paths to victory for Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the days since the election, the group has posted fewer than 100 posts per hour, NCoC said.
The fraud mentions on some platforms popular on the right began to drop the day before the election — after rising considerably in the run-up, said Welton Chang, co-founder of Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors fringe social networks.
“For one thing, Trump himself stopped talking about it,” Chang told AFP. “Part of this is a follow the leader effect.”
The drop-off in fraud narratives, researchers said, was particularly evident on alternative tech platforms catering to conservatives –- including Trump’s own Truth Social.
Trump ‘the conductor’
Not only did Trump go quiet on fraud claims after his unfounded Philadelphia allegations, but other Republicans have as well.
Asked on CNN whether he believed the election was free and fair, lawmaker and hard-line Trump ally Jim Jordan said “I do.”
He declined to engage with the suggestion that Republicans only call foul when they lose.
Trump won all seven battleground states and he is on pace to capture the popular vote, which he did not do in his shock election victory in 2016.
The Democratic leadership has not questioned the 2024 election’s outcome, with both Biden and Harris conceding the loss and deeming the result a free and fair one.
However, there were 30,300 mentions of the hashtag #DoNotConcedeKamala with one of the words rigged, fraud, or stolen on Musk’s social media platform X the morning after the election, data showed.
Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, said an isolated number of people on the left have cast doubt on the integrity of the vote.
“No major candidate or political organizer has amplified it,” she told AFP. “It is diffuse and significantly smaller because there is no leadership spreading it, whereas on the right that was the case in 2020 and 2022.”
She noted that on the right there was evidence from even the early voting period this year that Republicans and MAGA-affiliated influencers — shorthand for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan — were discussing potential election fraud.
“Think of it like Trump is the conductor, (and) there’s a symphony of media and legal infrastructure to really make sure that he won,” Tomson said. “That’s what they built.”