A remarkable thing happened Tuesday night on an “election integrity” discussion page on the social media platform X, as it became clear that former president Donald Trump was headed to a decisive victory against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Created by X owner Elon Musk’s America PAC, the page had provided a platform viewed by millions of users for rapid-fire updates about power outages causing poll closures, Russia-linked bomb threats and unsubstantiated accusations that run-of-the mill voting problems were the work of devious Democrats trying to steal the election.
Around midnight, however, interest in the forum plummeted. With Trump winning back the White House, the urgency to investigate wrongdoing subsided. In its place came a spike of self-congratulation as those who believe Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was riddled with fraud took credit for preventing similar corruption this year….
Election authorities and Democratic leaders took a different view. Some accused Republicans of contesting elections only whey they don’t like the outcome. Others credited front-line administrators with running a remarkably smooth election — just as they had in 2020, when Trump and his allies baselessly accused state and local authorities of stealing the result.
The true test of a democracy, several said, is accepting the result even when the other side wins….
Experts cautioned that election denial is not dead, pointing to the dozens of candidates for Congress as well as local office who won on Tuesday and who have questioned Trump’s defeat in 2020. And smaller strains of skepticism cropped up on Twitter early Wednesday. The phrase “TRUMP CHEATED” trended with 183,000 posts, and the hashtag #20millionvotes became popular on both sides of the political spectrum as users offered wildly divergent theories on why so many fewer Americans voted for Harris this year than for Biden in 2020. (The difference is closer to 14 million but seemed higher Tuesday night when the hashtag emerged.)…
Trump campaigned this year by saying Republicans needed to “swamp the vote” and get out in such large numbers that they made the election “too big to rig.” That gives them an easy path to return to denialism, said Rick Hasen, director of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project.
“There are certainly arguments that could be raised to try to revive this kind of denialism in the future should there be a political reason for it,” Hasen said.