WASHINGTON — In the lead-up to the election, President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies laid a foundation of skepticism regarding the reliability of the U.S. voting process, priming his supporters for a 2024 election expected to be fraught with considerable fraud.
The former president continued to propagate these doubts even on a relatively calm election day, voicing unsupported allegations about voting issues in cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, as well as calling attention to concerns in Milwaukee. Just as the polls began to close, he utilized his social media platform to claim, without providing any evidence, that there was “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” which was swiftly denied by city officials who asserted there was no proof of misconduct.
However, in an unexpected turn of events, Trump’s foreboding predictions faded as the night progressed and preliminary results began to show favorable outcomes for him. During his address on election night, he celebrated what he termed a “magnificent victory,” embracing the positive results and expressing gratitude for the very states he had questioned earlier in the day.
This sudden shift is characteristic of a tactical approach that many of his party members have employed: to preemptively accuse opponents of electoral fraud while being prepared to abandon those claims should they emerge victorious.
In the 2020 election, when Trump faced defeat against Joe Biden, he adopted a reverse strategy, unabatedly insisting for four years that the election was tainted, attempting to persuade his supporters that he was the legitimate victor. This unfounded narrative has successfully influenced public perception, with polls indicating that more than half of Republicans still maintain that Biden was not legitimately elected in the 2020 election.
Leading up to the recent elections, many of Trump’s supporters pointed to alleged evidence of electoral fraud, claims that were quickly dismissed as soon as it became apparent that Trump was in the lead.
Numerous congressional Republicans previously fought for implementing a mandate on proving citizenship for voter registration, insisting that elections could not be fair without this additional protocol. Yet, in the wake of Trump’s success, many of the staunch supporters of this legislation congratulated him while failing to reiterate their earlier concerns about election integrity.
David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney and current executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, noted that it has become common for candidates to only raise allegations of fraud when they have lost or anticipate a loss. “It’s revealing that we’ve encountered fewer claims of fraud following an election where former President Trump won,” Becker said.
This approach raises significant issues, suggesting that if a preferred candidate loses, the entire electoral system is deemed illegitimate, according to Leah Wright Rigueur, a history expert at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University.
While Republicans often highlight instances where candidates from other parties have rejected election results, such as Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who did not formally concede her 2018 gubernatorial race to Republican Brian Kemp, Trump remains unique. He is the only former president who has actively attempted to reverse the outcome of a lost election, notably his involvement in the violent January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol after urging his followers to “fight like hell,” which has drawn condemnation from advocates of democracy across political lines.
On Wednesday, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris reached out to Trump to congratulate him on his victory. However, numerous posts on the social platform X, popular among left-leaning users, suggested that she not concede or called for a recount in 2024, thereby sowing further doubt about the election results.
Some skeptics on the right, despite their candidate’s decisive win, remained unconvinced about the legitimacy of the election process. “They rigged 2020. We weren’t ready. They tried to rig 2024. We were ready,” claimed David Clements, a former prosecutor and conservative speaker in a social media statement.
The forthcoming Trump administration’s approach to reforming U.S. elections remains uncertain. Mike Lindell, founder of MyPillow and a known election skeptic, communicated to supporters that he had discussed ideas with Trump about abandoning voting machines in favor of a return to paper ballots that would be hand-counted.
Experts caution that nearly all ballots already have a paper trail, and they warn that relying solely on hand-counting would be significantly more expensive, prone to human error, and vastly more time-intensive compared to machine counting.
Despite the absence of fraud allegations in Trump’s victory speech, Becker viewed the situation as promising, expressing hope that it might signify a shift in belief regarding the integrity of elections among Trump and his supporters. “If we can reach a point where President Trump and his followers trust in the integrity of our elections, that would be a positive change,” he commented. “The likelihood of election officials being targeted in retaliation for alleged misconduct diminishes, which is certainly an encouraging development.”