On the Wednesday after Election Day, when it was clear that Donald Trump was going to be the 47th president of the United States, users on social media began to push that the 2024 election had been stolen. It was not entirely surprising, considering that false information about the 2020 election led to the deadly January 6th insurrection. What was a bit surprising this time, however, is that the claims are not being pushed by just MAGA members: It’s also being pushed by Democrats.
To be clear, no elected officials have given these claims any validity, unlike the Republican Party in 2020. Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election on Wednesday, Nov. 6, and President Joe Biden has already met with President-elect Trump and his transition team. For years, none of this has really been news, but after 2020 a president now conceding the power of the oval office has become an important topic.
Mark Thomas, Ph. D., a professor of political science at La Salle University, said that elected Democrats not pushing these claims was very important. Using a sports analogy, he said, “2020 was a mess because not only did people challenge the referees (the vote counters), they then did not accept the results of the game. It wasn’t good sportsmanship. Good sportsmanship is an element of good Democratic politics.”
Just because none of the higher ups in the Democratic Party have latched on to these claims, however, doesn’t mean they aren’t there, or make them any less dangerous.
The day after the election, posts on X began circulating about how Harris being down 20 million votes compared to Biden showed that Donald Trump had won the election, and a post from six days ago on Instagram claimed that Harris being down 15 million votes “doesn’t pass the smell test.”
None of these claims have any truth. What seems to have happened is that people immediately reacted to numbers that were being posted in the days after the election, without realizing there were still tens of millions of votes left to be counted. Even today, California still has an estimated 13 percent of votes left to be counted, Oregon has 8 percent, and Utah has 7 percent, according to the Associated Press.
Thomas also talked about other election fraud claims he had seen.
“I’ve been reading a few blogs off of Reddit about the alleged manipulation of voting machines and Starlink,” he said, referring to online posts that Elon Musk, an avid Trump supporter and Trump’s pick to lead the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, used his telecommunications company Starlink to hack machines to rig the election. “And really, the comments in there, I wouldn’t give any credit to the argument they make about how Harris could lose swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada. I think that’s what they find so unbelievable.”
In Pennsylvania, Trump had claimed that there was “cheating” going on in Philadelphia on election night, and voters in the Commonwealth, both Republicans and Democrats, have said that the results of the election prove there was fraud, either in this election or in 2020. However, according to Lauren Cristella, President and CEO of the PA voting rights organization Committee of Seventy, this was not the case.
“Despite some efforts to undermine confidence, including unfounded claims of ‘cheating’ in Philadelphia, our election process proved strong, transparent, and efficient,” said Cristella. “When issues arose, election officials acted swiftly to minimize disruptions and ensure every voice was heard. While there will always be bumps in the road – like minor technical issues and missing materials – the system works.”
As of this piece, Trump is up on Harris by a little over three million votes. Harris is currently at a little under 73 million, roughly 8 million behind what President Biden got in 2020. With votes still to be counted in many Democratic states, it is fair to reason that Harris will have a higher number of voters by the end of the week, and a significantly higher number of votes than last Wednesday.
There is an argument about how many people believe this election was stolen. In a recent episode of the On The Media podcast, Anna Merlan, a senior reporter for Mother Jones, pushed back on the belief that the number doesn’t matter when talking to host Micha Loewinger.
“I don’t think that it is an overwhelming point of view among Harris supporters, or people on the left, or Democrats. That is not the sense that I get,” said Merlan. “It is a substantial and vocal minority, and certainly enough that the AP, for instance, has had to put out a fact checking piece on the fact that some rural communities use Starlink as an Internet provider, but their voting equipment is not connected to Starlink.”
Later in the episode, Merlan said, “People engage in conspiratorial thinking on the left, on the right, and in politically undefined places. In this case, we see a really clear example of the ways that people, when they are facing a moment of loss, a moment of confusion, a loss of power, they engage in conspiratorial thinking.”
This type of engagement is deeply troubling to Thomas. “It’s not a good argument at all to say, ‘Just because the Republicans did in 2020, the Democrats need to do it in 2024.’ It’s ridiculous. It’s a tit for tat game. Politics is not a zero-sum game.”
READ: New Book Offers Insights Into Why the United States Is a Country ‘Marinated in Conspiracy Theory’
While election fraud claims are not being pushed by Democratic elected members, Republicans who lost Senate races in states where Trump won still are. Kari Lake, who famously said her loss for 2022 Arizona governorship was due to voter fraud, still has not verbally conceded her race. And Eric Hovde, who is currently losing to Senator Tammy Baldwin, posted a video on X with many false claims about voting irregularities that were fact checked by both the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and USA Today.
Thomas said his biggest fear about all of these election denial claims is that people will continue to try to overturn elections.
“I worry because, one, it creates violence, two, it creates doubt about the stability of the system and three, it puts our election workers, our politicians, at grave risk,” he said. “Violence has no place in Democracy. That’s one of the basic Democratic values. Denouncing violence is a tool for political change. So whenever you see any group being violent to try to get their point across, they actually lose support from the broader populace.”
