Because the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches its conclusion, polls recommend that the result is likely to be among the many closest in American historical past. That may very well be dangerous information for the well being of the political system since mistrust in American election integrity is increased than at some other level since researchers started measuring it. That’s largely due to a litany of false claims in regards to the 2020 election made by former President Donald Trump, this 12 months’s Republican nominee. Surveys recommend that due to this effort, a majority of Republicans now consider that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, which heightens the chance of post-election turmoil if there’s certainly a photo-finish conclusion to this 12 months’s race.
The origins of the theories
The seeds for 2020’s post-election conspiracy theories have been planted within the 2016 election cycle, when Trump refused through the marketing campaign to say that he would settle for the result if Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was the winner. After his poll-defying, surprising victory within the Electoral School, Trump then claimed erroneously that he would even have received the favored vote if hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants hadn’t voted for Clinton. “Along with profitable the Electoral School in a landslide, I received the favored vote if you happen to deduct the hundreds of thousands of people that voted illegally,” stated Trump in a Twitter submit on Nov. 27, 2016.
Trump went nicely past these claims in 2020. One piece of Trump’s baseless stolen election conspiracy centered on voting machine fraud. In response to this concept, which was promoted by Trump and his allies in conservative media, machines systematically switched 2.7 million votes from Trump to Democratic nominee Joe Biden to alter the result. Fox Information, which boosted the conspiracy concept that voting gear was rigged for Biden, settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Methods — one outstanding goal of this hypothesis — for $787.5 million.
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In each the run-up and aftermath of the election, Trump additionally claimed that numerous types of fraud came about, notably with mail balloting, a type of advance voting. Many states had expanded alternatives for advance voting because of the distinctive menace of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump claimed that election officers in locations like Detroit and Philadelphia had containers of Biden votes “dumped,” and that Democrats have been “harvesting” mail-in and absentee ballots that have been illegitimate. Trump additionally stated that the arduous counting of mail ballots in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which finally reversed Trump’s leads in votes forged on Election Day, was fraudulent. “Final evening I used to be main, typically solidly, in lots of key States, in virtually all situations Democrat run & managed. Then, one after the other, they began to magically disappear as shock poll dumps have been counted,” stated Trump in a tweet on Nov. 4.
A barrage of lies
Trump additionally made numerous different baseless claims, together with that unlawful ballots have been printed abroad and counted, that voting machines have been manufactured by the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, that Republican observers have been barred from vote-counting areas in order that Democrats may commit fraud and that when once more hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants forged ballots completely for Biden.
There have been numerous investigations, audits, recounts and analyses of those claims and no credible proof has ever been produced in help of them. “Trump’s claims of fraud or illegality are riddled with errors, hampered by misunderstandings about how one can analyze official voter data, and stuffed with confusion about primary statistical methods and ideas,” stated political scientists Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy in a 2024 paper.
Whereas it was Republicans making these claims in 2020, some Democrats believed within the aftermath of the 2004 election that voting machines in Ohio — again then the corporate in query was known as Diebold — modified voter preferences from Democratic nominee John Kerry to incumbent Republican President George W. Bush. Kerry, nevertheless, conceded the election the subsequent day and few Democrats objected to the outcomes. This 12 months, Trump has as soon as once more spent appreciable time stoking fears of a stolen election with related claims to these he made in 2020.
