Leading up to Election Day, Donald Trump and his supporters were issuing warnings of voter fraud. But as soon as his decisive victory came, the flood of misinformation slowed.
Experts said the change points to what opponents have long argued was the preemptive deployment of fraud claims in the event of Trump’s defeat, setting the stage for him to challenge the results. It happened as they did in the 2020 elections.
A stark example came at the end of voting on Tuesday when officials in Pennsylvania, the largest city in the victory, were quick to refute Trump’s baseless claim that police were responding to “mass fraud” in Philadelphia.
These were the latest suspicions raised by the former TV star about election fraud. But the false allegations are based on his rejection of the 2020 results, which ultimately led his supporters to violently try to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory.
“As the vote swung in their favor, Republicans stopped making election fraud claims late Tuesday, proving once again that it was all a fluke,” Philip Mai, co-director of the Toronto-based Social Media Lab, told AFP. It was a gift.”
The decline was particularly noticeable among members of the “Election Integrity Community,” a group on Facebook started by Elon Musk’s America PAC that encouraged its nearly 65,000 members to report irregularities.
When voting began on November 5, the group shared more than 1,000 posts an hour, according to data collected by the nonprofit National Conference on Citizenship (NCOC).
By the time the race was declared for Trump in some key swing states as early as November 6, momentum had dropped dramatically, blocking viable paths to victory for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The NCOC said the group has made less than 100 posts per hour since the election.
Welton Chang, co-founder of Pyra Technologies, a company that tracks social networks, said mentions of fraud on some popular platforms began to decline the day before the election — after rising substantially the day before the election.
“For one thing, Trump himself stopped talking about it,” Chang told AFP. “Part of it is the effect of following the leader.”
The decline in hoax stories was particularly evident on alternative tech platforms that cater to conservatives — including Trump’s own Truth Social, the researchers said.
– Trump ‘Operator’ –
After the Philadelphia allegations, not only did Trump become silent on the fraud claims, but so did other Republicans.
Asked on CNN whether he believed the election was free and fair, Congressman and staunch Trump ally Jim Jordan said, “I believe that.”
He refused to engage with the suggestion that Republicans call foul only when they lose.
Trump won all seven battleground states and 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 outcome of the 2024 election, with both Biden and Harris acknowledging the loss and calling the result free and fair.
However, data shows that Musk’s social media platforms the morning after the election
Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, said a disproportionate number of people on the left have expressed doubts about the integrity of the vote.
“No major candidate or political organizer has promoted it,” he told AFP. “It is diffuse and quite small because there is no leadership to diffuse it, whereas on the right that was the case in 2020 and 2022.”
He said there was also evidence from the early voting period this year on the right that Republicans and MAGA-affiliated influencers — shorthand for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan — were discussing possible election fraud.
“Think of it like Trump is the conductor, (and) there’s really a symphony of media and legal infrastructure to make sure he wins,” Tomson said. “This is what they created.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
