In the months leading up to the election, Donald Trump and his Republican allies warned relentlessly of widespread voter fraud. Trump accused Democrats of trying to steal the election by cheating, and he repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results unless he won.
On Election Day, Trump further amplified those claims and suggested that there was voter fraud in Philadelphia and Detroit, two major cities in battleground states. Elon Musk’s “Election Integrity Community” discussion page on X was also rife with conspiracy theories about Democrats cheating.
Yet on election night, as the results looked to be in Trump’s favor, the claims tapered off. Instead of dark warnings about election fraud, posts on X’s “election integrity” page grew self-congratulatory and “the urgency to investigate wrongdoing subsided,” The Washington Post reported. Far-right channels on the Telegram platform, where voter fraud claims were widespread in recent days, suddenly grew quiet as well, according to The New York Times.
And, most significantly, there was no more talk of voter fraud from Trump, who spent months sowing doubt about the integrity of the 2024 presidential election — and who, to this day, refuses to concede the 2020 election.
After the race was called for Trump early Wednesday, baseless claims about voter fraud grew among the left, too, much of which centered on allegations that there were missing votes for Kamala Harris. (As of Thursday morning, votes are still being counted in several states, including in California, Washington and Alaska, as well as the battleground states of Nevada and Arizona.) But those claims were not endorsed or boosted by Democratic officials. Harris also struck a starkly different tone in her concession speech Wednesday than Trump did on election night four years ago. “A fundamental principle of American democracy,” she said, “is that when we lose an election, we accept the results.”
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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