Insider:

On Monday, former President Donald Trump said he was “not a believer in the integrity of Virginia’s elections.”

The next day, he took credit for Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s win in the state. 

Following Trump’s lead, other Republicans and conservative pundits abandoned their claims that Democrats would steal the election immediately after Youngkin became the first Republican to win a Virginia gubernatorial election in over a decade.

The conservative talk-radio host John Fredericks warned of rampant voter fraud in an October 27 broadcast, saying: “Everything’s moving in Youngkin’s direction and the Republicans, but a lot of people fear that this is going to get stolen — they’re going to try and cheat. We’ve got all kinds of irregularities right now going on.”

Mother Jones reported that John Mills, a former cybersecurity official at the Pentagon who is now a conservative commentator for the far-right Epoch Times, claimed that ballot-counting facilities had poor security and that “people can walk in and out.”

Republican state Sen. Amanda Chase of Virginia, a Youngkin surrogate who has long claimed the 2020 election was rigged, baselessly claimed in an interview last month that “Democrats are cheating” in the early vote and that she had passed along to the Youngkin campaign that Democrats “are stealing elections in Virginia.”

Youngkin said he knew nothing about these claims and the election would be fair. On Tuesday night, Chase congratulated Youngkin on his win. She never released any evidence of voter fraud, which she said she had.