Voter fraud, stolen elections, cheating. That was so yesterday.
Or more precisely, so Nov. 5.
Donald Trump and way too many of his supporters who know better claimed throughout the campaign that, again, the voting would be rigged against him — right up through Election Day, until it was clear he’d won.
Then it stopped in a heartbeat. That might have been one of the least surprising things about this election.
It doesn’t quite work to say the American people have spoken in your favor while casting suspicion on the election outcome. What had caused outrage in some quarters for months or years suddenly was met with a shrug, if that.
Interestingly, and somewhat entertainingly, there was low-level conspiracy theorizing on the left and right following initial results regarding 20 million “missing” votes. That, like so many other falsehoods, was not only debunked, but underscores that some people don’t understand how elections work in the United States. More on that in a moment.
On Election Day, Trump insisted his opponents were “cheating” in Pennsylvania. A day earlier, he claimed “(t)hey are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing.”
Apparently, that’s what he considered legitimate and eventually unsuccessful efforts to put Vice President Kamala Harris over the top in the Keystone State.
That Trump was able to convince so many people that the 2024 election would fraudulently go against him is a testament to his powers of persuasion, along with showing the gullibility of a lot of folks.
After all, there was never any evidence to back up Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him — not in the dozens of court cases his forces pursued, not in the independent reviews and not in the recounts.
Though he won the White House in 2016, Trump empaneled a task force to investigate the election and found widespread fraud didn’t exist. Subsequent Trump-commissioned efforts reached similar conclusions.
A Republican-backed review of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona confirmed Biden’s victory in the pivotal state.
It’s worth mentioning again that an exhaustive Associated Press investigation in 2021 found fewer than 475 instances of confirmed voter fraud across six battleground states — nowhere near the magnitude required to sway the outcome of the presidential election.
Trump was repeatedly told by members of his own administration that there was no evidence that he was denied re-election in 2020 because of fraud.
Maybe, at long last, he’ll let it go. But then winning in 2016 didn’t stop Trump. He claimed without proof that millions of undocumented immigrants voted and gave Hillary Clinton a victory in the popular vote, though not the electoral vote that put him in the White House. He made similar claims before Nov. 5. This farce has been disproved time and again.
That was silly then and now, though all of a sudden, people don’t seem worked up about it.
Never mind that such a sweeping coordinated scheme would be tough to keep under wraps — no one gave a reasonable explanation as to why millions of undocumented migrants who risk coming to the U.S. to seek a better life would risk jail and deportation to vote.
Claims of voter fraud swinging national elections have been around for ages. In modern times, studies have repeatedly dismissed such accusations as unfounded.
Trump’s silence on the matter should confirm that his fraud claims were not real, said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, which works with Republican and Democratic election officials to strengthen confidence in elections.
“It was never about whether our system was actually secure. It was never about whether or not the election could be trusted or policies that could make an election more secure or not, it was just about the outcome,” Becker told USA Today.
That’s not to say there aren’t fraudulent attempts on the margins or that technical problems with elections haven’t occurred. And it’s plausible those could affect a close vote count in, say, a swing state.
But increased vigilance by elected officials, along with partisan monitors from both major political parties, increasingly ferret out such problems. If there’s silver lining in all of this election fraud nonsense it may be that the integrity of U.S. elections has been enhanced.
“As we have said repeatedly, our election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election community never better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free, and fair elections for the American people,” said U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly on Nov. 6.
“This is what we saw yesterday in the peaceful and secure exercise of democracy. Importantly, we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”
That, of course, didn’t satisfy everyone.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s new government efficiency co-boss, this week circulated unfounded claims that ballots from noncitizens were being counted in the Pennsylvania Senate race.
Now, let’s get back to those mysterious 20 million votes. Some people last week posted on social media that in 2020 Biden had 20 million more votes than Harris gained in 2024. Those on the left claimed Harris was being robbed, while those on the right insisted this was proof that Biden’s victory four years ago was a scam.
Here’s the reality, as noted by FactCheck.org and others: That was based on an incomplete vote count. Virtually all states have additional ballots to count after initial tallies. California, for example, had about 5 million more votes to count after Election Day, in large part because of late mail ballots.
After all ballots were tallied, Biden had received more than 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million in 2020, a record high turnout year. Some immediately pounced on Harris’ much lower total.
But the total was 73 million for Harris and 75.9 million for Trump as of Thursday (Nov. 14), according to The Associated Press’ tally, which showed that all but two states had yet to count all of the ballots.
That “aha!” moment may have seemed fun while it lasted, but, alas, it was just another bogus election fraud distraction. Thankfully, it didn’t dominate political discourse like earlier ones.
It’s been said before that there are lots of reasons to trust elections. Hopefully, now more people will — and not just when their side wins.
