WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies had spent months sowing doubt about the integrity of America’s voting systems train advocates we can expect elections in 2024 full of massive and inevitable fraud.
The former president continued to lay that foundation, even during a largely smooth voting day On Tuesday, he made baseless claims regarding Philadelphia and Detroit and highlighted concerns about election operations in Milwaukee. Shortly before polls closed, he announced on his social media platform, without providing details: “There is a lot of talk about massive cheating in Philadelphia.” The statement prompted immediate denials from city leaders who said there was no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Still, Trump’s grim warnings ended abruptly in the later hours of the evening, as early returns began to tilt in his favor. During his speech on election nighthailed the president-elect a “magnificent victory” as he claimed the favorable results and expressed his love for the same states he had questioned hours earlier.
The messaging pivot was part of a Trump playbook which many in his party have adopted: To preventive facing a loss claims of widespread deception but be prepared to quickly ignore them in the event of a win.
In 2020, when he lost to Joe BidenTrump executed the other side of that strategy: he spent the next four years doubling down the false idea that the election had been stolen, leading him to try to convince supporters that he was the rightful winner. The campaign was successful in changing minds: opinion polls show that more than half of Republicans still believe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.
In the weeks and months leading up to Tuesday’s election, many Trump supporters supported alleged evidence of fraud, which they stopped highlighting once it became clear that Trump was in charge.
Several Republicans in Congress had also fought to require this proof of citizenship for voter registration and argued that there was no way the election could be fair without that extra layer of security. Still, the legislation’s biggest supporters congratulated Trump overnight without echoing those concerns.
It has become a common occurrence for candidates to focus on claims of possible fraud only when they have lost or think they will lose, said David Becker, a former attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“I think it’s somewhat telling that we’ve seen fewer fraud claims in the aftermath of an election in which former president and future president Trump won,” Becker said Wednesday.
The strategy sets a problematic precedent: “If your favorite candidate doesn’t win, it must mean the entire system is illegitimate,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, professor of history at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
As Republicans have often emphasized, it is not just their party that has refused to accept races they have lost. They often highlight the example of Democratic activist and former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams, who ended her 2018 campaign for governor without explicitly conceding defeat to her Republican opponent, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp.
Yet Trump is the only American president who has taken steps to try to overthrow the outcome of an election he lost outright. The role he played in the violence January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol after calling on his supporters to “fight like hell” has been condemned by democracy advocates in both political parties.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him on his election victory and vowed to help Trump in a peaceful transfer of power in a concession speech later in the day at Howard University, her alma mater.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the outcome,” she said.
Her concession has not stopped countless left-wing users on social platforms such as X and TikTok from calling for a recount or raising unfounded suspicion about the outcome of her race with Trump. Some amassed tens of thousands of shares promoting baseless claims that Harris’ vote totals showed something was wrong. Although there is no longer a path for Harris to the presidency, presidential election totals are still incomplete as several states continue to count ballots.
Meanwhile, for some right-wing election skeptics, even their candidate’s decisive victory was not evidence that the election was above board.
“They rigged 2020. We weren’t ready for it. They tried to manipulate 2024. We were ready,” David Clements, a former prosecutor and conservative public speaker, wrote in a social media post.
It remains to be seen how exactly the next Trump administration will attempt to reform US elections. MyPillow founder and election denier Mike Lindell sent an email to supporters on Wednesday saying he had discussed plans with Trump to throw out machines and “go back to paper ballots, counted by hand.”
Almost every ballot cast in the US election already has a paper fileand election officials are warning about it manually counting all ballots would be more expensive, more error-prone and much more time-consuming than machine counting.
Becker said that while the absence of fraud allegations in Trump’s victory speech showed his hand, it was a positive development.
“If we can get to the point now where President Trump and his supporters believe in the integrity of our elections … then I will accept that,” Becker said. “We wake up this morning with less likelihood that election officials across the country will be targeted — in many cases by name — for potential violence, and that’s a good thing.”
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Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.
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