Election denial movement in the United States

The election denial movement in the United States is a widespread false belief among many Republicans that elections in the United States are rigged and stolen through election fraud by Democrats. Adherents of the movement are referred to as election deniers. Election fraud conspiracy theories have spread online and through conservative conferences, community events, and door-to-door canvassing. Since the 2020 United States presidential election, many Republican politicians have sought elective office or taken legislative steps to address what they assert is weak election integrity leading to widespread fraudulent elections, though no evidence of systemic election fraud has come to light and many studies have found that it is extremely rare.

The movement came to prominence after Donald Trump was defeated in the 2020 United States presidential election. Trump had a history of questioning elections before he ran for office, notably the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama. He grew the movement among his supporters by making consistently false allegations of fraud during the 2016, and in particular the 2020 presidential election. With these false and unsubstantiated claims, Trump and his associates sought to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden; he and others have been indicted on federal and state charges involving election subversion. Trump's false allegations came to be known as his "big lie". Trump has since endorsed only Republican candidates who agree the 2020 election had been stolen from him, and did not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 presidential election, should he lose. By April 2024, Trump had embraced mail-in balloting and early voting, which he had for years vilified as corrupt and contributors to his 2020 election loss.

Going back decades, some influential Republicans who have expressed concerns around election security have been accused of using the fear of voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression.^[1][2] A notable quote that has been used as evidence of bad faith efforts to address voter fraud comes from Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who said in a speech in 1980, "I don't want everybody to vote ... our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."^[2] Aspects of election denialism have been noted to relate to the great replacement theory,^[3] which has been embraced by some Republican politicians to demonstrate their loyalty to Donald Trump.^[4] Trump has falsely claimed that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration to allow noncitizens to vote and create a permanent Democratic majority.^[5]

Election experts have found that election fraud is vanishingly rare, not systemic, and not at levels that could have impacted a presidential election.^[6][7][8] In response to Donald Trump's 2016 claims of millions of fraudulent votes, the Brennan Center in 2017 evaluated voter fraud data and arrived at a fraud rate of 0.0003–0.0025%.^[9] That year, the center also analyzed the Heritage Foundation's database of voter fraud as tiny, reaching back to 1948, and one in which the vast majority of cases would still occur under the Foundation's proposed election reforms.^[10]

Professor Andrew Smolar and Dr. Geoffrey Kabaservice believe this election denial movement began with the Tea Party after Obama's election, citing the Birtherism conspiracy theory as helping to dissolve trust in institutions and objective truth.^[11][12] Other dates that have been suggested for the start of this movement include 2012,^[13] 2016,^[14] and 2020.^[15]

Analyst Chris Sautter argues the movement is the latest stage of wrangling about election rules that began in the 1960s regarding severe restrictions to stop Blacks from voting in most of the South. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discrimination and enabled the federal government to block new restrictions. During the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, the Republican National Committee (RNC) launched "ballot security" and "voter integrity" campaigns to reduce what it alleged to be voter fraud. They focused on minority communities with large Democratic majorities. They stationed off-duty police officers in conspicuous locations near polling places, distributed leaflets suggesting voters could be subjected to prosecution, and made unsupported challenges of registered voters. Federal courts concluded the techniques were designed to frighten minority voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Republican Party officials were forced to sign a consent decree agreeing to stop. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in its ruling on Shelby County v. Holder, which enabled Republican legislatures in at least 20 states to impose new obstacles for the 2018 elections.^[16][17]

After Obama was declared the winner of the Electoral College while still trailing in the popular vote count early on election night 2012, Trump tweeted the election was a "total sham" because Obama "lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election" and "the electoral college is a disaster for a democracy", adding: "We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty."^[18] Final election results showed Obama won the popular vote by nearly five million ballots.^[19] In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots.^[20] ABC News writer Terrence Smith described Trump's statements as the first example showing a broader playbook of election denial.^[13] Despite Trump's comments, unsuccessful Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney accepted the results and conceded defeat.

During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump alleged, without evidence, that his opponent Senator Ted Cruz stole the Iowa presidential caucuses after he had won them.^[13] During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump asserted that the only way he could lose was if there was election fraud.^[21] Trump political advisor Roger Stone created a "Stop the Steal" organization in 2016 in the event Trump lost; it was revived after Trump's loss in 2020.^[22]

Trump claimed, without evidence, that millions of undocumented migrants voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, costing him the popular vote victory.^[23] As a result, Trump established an election integrity commission in May 2017, but the commission was disbanded several months later, with member Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, writing to commission chair Mike Pence and vice chair Kris Kobach that, contrary to public statements by Trump and Kobach, the commission did not find "substantial" voter fraud.^[24] Dunlap alleged the true purpose of the commission was to create a pretext to pave the way for policy changes designed to undermine the right to vote. Critics said the commission's intent was to disenfranchise or deter legal voters.^[25] Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions.^[26][27] The commission did not find a single instance of a non-citizen voting.^[28]

In spite of accepting the 2016 election result at the time, Hillary Clinton expressed doubts about that election in a 2020 interview:^[29]

'There was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level,' Clinton said during an interview for the latest episode of The Atlantic's politics podcast, The Ticket. 'We still don't know what really happened. There's just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover,' the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential nominee continued. 'But you don't win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, 'Whoa, something's not right here.' That was a deep sense of unease.'

Donald Trump complained of widespread voter fraud leading up to and following the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which was widely debunked. Having never conceded, Trump used this allegation of fraud as justification to try multiple times to subvert the election results and remain in office. Trump has demanded those seeking his endorsement to support his unfounded allegations of fraud. Many of those involved in the plots, including the riot on January 6, 2021, have been convicted, charged or are under investigation for crimes such as insurrection. Three witnesses close to Trump testified to the January 6 committee that they were aware Trump acknowledged he had lost within days after the election.^[30]

Trump did not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election if he were to lose.^[32][33] Trump's niece Mary L. Trump and former Republican Representative Anthony Gonzalez, among others, predicted that he would once again deny the results of a loss and try to steal the election.^[34][35] According to NPR, the continuation of election denial tactics by Trump for the 2024 election was likely.^[36] In the lead up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party made false claims of massive "noncitizen voting" by immigrants in an attempt to delegitimize the election if Trump had lost.^[3] States found very few noncitizens on their voting rolls, and in the extremely rare instances of votes cast by noncitizens they are legal immigrants who are often mistaken that they have a right to vote. An election fraud database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2024 indicated 85 instances of irregularities among noncitizens since 2002.^{[37][38][39][40]}

Many Republicans, notably Trump, long criticized "ballot harvesting" and the early voting it enables as rife with fraud and cheating, encouraging their voters to vote only at polling places on election day. The 2022 Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules was centered on false allegations of illegal ballot harvesting by unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party to commit election fraud. After disappointing Republican results in the 2020 and 2022 elections, some Trump-aligned organizations such as Turning Point USA recognized they needed to adopt similar ballot collection methods for the 2024 elections, which they named "ballot chasing". Turning Point said it would raise money to create "the largest and most impactful ballot chasing operation the movement has ever seen". Kari Lake, who refused to concede her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race, said she would launch "the largest ballot chasing operation in our nation's history". Media Matters reported in March 2024 that Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee, had said on a recent podcast that the RNC would launch a "legal ballot harvesting" effort.^[41][42][43] Lara Trump said on the same podcast that "I'm gonna say 75 million-plus Americans who still are like, what the hell happened in 2020? They didn't get any answers." She baselessly claimed that the odds of mail-in ballots giving Biden swing state victories was "one in one quadrillion to the fourth power."^[44] After insisting for several years that mail-in balloting is "totally corrupt" and contributed to his 2020 election loss, by April 2024 Donald Trump and the RNC were encouraging his supporters to adopt mail-in and early voting.^{[45][46][47][48]}

During the campaign, Trump often referred to "election integrity" to allude to his continuing lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, as well as baseless predictions of future mass election fraud. As he did during the 2020 election cycle, without evidence Trump told supporters that Democrats might try to rig the 2024 election. Many Republicans believe a conspiracy theory claiming Democrats engage in systematic election fraud to steal elections, insisting election integrity is a major concern, though voting fraud is extremely rare. By 2022, Republican politicians, conservative cable news outlets and talk radio echoed a narrative of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon that "if Democrats don't cheat, they don't win". Appearing with Trump in April 2024, House Speaker Mike Johnson baselessly suggested "potentially hundreds of thousands of votes" might be cast by undocumented migrants; as president, Trump falsely asserted that millions of votes cast by undocumented migrants had deprived him of a popular vote victory in the 2016 election. Politico reported in June 2022 that the RNC sought to deploy an "army" of poll workers and attorneys in swing states who could refer what they deemed questionable ballots in Democratic voting precincts to a network of friendly district attorneys to challenge. In April 2024, RNC co-chair Lara Trump said the party had the ability to install poll workers who could handle ballots, rather than merely observe polling places. She also said that the 2018 expiration of the 1982 consent decree prohibiting the RNC from intimidation of minority voters "gives us a great ability" in the election. Trump's political operation said in April 2024 that it planned to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers to polling places across battleground states, with an "election integrity hotline" for poll watchers and voters to report alleged voting irregularities. Trump told a rally audience in December 2023 that they needed to "guard the vote" in Democratic-run cities. He had complained that his 2020 campaign was not adequately prepared to challenge his loss in courts; some critics said his 2024 election integrity effort is actually intended to gather allegations to overwhelm the election resolution process should he challenge the 2024 election results. Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer who defeated every Trump court challenge after the 2020 election, remarked, "I think they are going to have a massive voter suppression operation and it is going to involve very, very large numbers of people and very, very large numbers of lawyers."^[49]

Days after the RNC voted Lara Trump and Michael Whatley to lead the organization, former OANN anchor Christina Bobb was named to head the RNC election integrity program which Lara Trump said occupied "an entire wing of the building". A staunch Trump advocate, Bobb was involved in attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and promoted the false allegation that the election had been stolen from Trump by fraud. Bobb and seventeen other Republicans were each indicted on nine counts of fraud, forgery, and conspiracy in April 2024 for their alleged involvement in the Trump fake electors plot in Arizona.^{[50][51][52][53]} In April 2024, the RNC released a robocall script falsely alleging Democrats committed "massive fraud" in the 2020 election. The script added, "If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn't even an American citizen."^[54]

By May 2024, election deniers in support of Trump had moved closer to the GOP mainstream. A report released on May 21, 2024 by States United Action found that "170 representatives and senators out of 535 lawmakers overall can be categorized as election deniers" and that two Senate candidates and 17 House candidates were on the ballot to join them. By 2024, the prevalence of election deniers was noted to have increased among top Republican officials in the RNC.^[55] In May, the Associated Press reported that under Lara Trump the RNC has "sought alliances with election deniers, conspiracy theorists and alt-right advocates the party had previously kept at arm's length." It also reported that Lara Trump supported a nationwide policy of not counting any ballots after Election Day, which was noted to be illegal.^[56] Trump and several Republicans have stated they will not accept the results of the 2024 election if they believe they are "unfair".^[33]

After the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams lost to Republican candidate Brian Kemp – who, as Georgia Secretary of State, administered the election – and claimed that the election was "stolen" from her as well as claiming the election was "rigged" and "not a free or fair election," ^[57] on the grounds that voter registrations had been improperly canceled and polling places in poor and minority neighborhoods had been improperly closed. The Washington Post reported that "more than 200 polling places" across Georgia were closed in the 2018 election, "primarily in poor and minority neighborhoods. Voters reported long lines, malfunctioning voting machines and other problems that delayed or thwarted voting in those areas."^[58] The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that "precinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots" on the 2018 Election Day^[59] – less than Kemp's margin of victory. According to Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California at Irvine, "there is no question that Georgia in general and Brian Kemp in particular took steps to make it harder for people to register and vote, and that those people tended to skew Democratic."^[60] In 2022, Kemp again defeated Abrams, by a larger margin; Abrams conceded on election night.

In addition to making false claims about the previous election a centerpiece of her 2022 Arizona gubernatorial campaign, Kari Lake refused to concede her loss, traveling the country into 2023 to promote her election fraud allegations amid speculation she was considering a run for Senate or being named as Trump's running mate in 2024. Her several lawsuits challenging her loss were thrown out, as has a lawsuit to stop using electronic machines.^[61][62] A July 2023 suit filed by Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, alleging Lake defamed him by claiming he had rigged the election against her, was in December 2023 cleared to proceed to trial.^[63] Lake was the Republican nominee in the 2024 United States Senate election in Arizona.

Conservative news outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax and OANN promoted false election fraud allegations during the weeks following the 2020 election, including conspiracy theories that voting machines had been rigged to favor Biden. Voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic filed defamation suits against those three cable networks, some of their employees and others. Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement to Dominion in April 2023 after it was revealed that top on-air personalities and executives knew the allegations were false but continued to promote them anyway.^[64][65][66]

An October 2022 Washington Post analysis found that 51% of Republican nominees for House, Senate and key statewide offices in nearly every state that year denied or questioned the 2020 presidential election outcome.^[67] Secretaries of state oversee elections in states. In 2022, nearly one in three Republican candidates for those offices supported overturning the 2020 presidential election results.^[68][69] The America First Secretary of State Coalition, co-founded and led by Nevada Republican Jim Marchant, was created in 2021 to promote election deniers for secretary of state in the 2022 United States secretary of state elections.^[70] All but one of nearly twenty candidates the group endorsed in 2022 lost in the general election.^[71][72] According to analysis by the nonpartisan States United Action, election denialism cost Republican candidates from 2.3 to 3.7 percentage points of votes in the 2022 midterm elections.^[73] Trump made his election fraud claims a litmus test for Republican candidates and the heart of his platform.^[74] After Mike Johnson won the October 2023 Speaker of the United States House election, David A. Graham posited that only members of the election denial movement had a chance to win the speakership with only Republican votes.^[75]

As of August 2023, a poll found that almost 70% of Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents continued to believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.^[76]

Sarah Longwell, a Republican political strategist who strongly opposes Trumpism, wrote in April 2022 that she asked Trump voters in focus groups why they continue to believe the election was stolen from him. She perceived that for many it was a hard-to-explain tribal response to a message that is echoed throughout the participants' social and media environment.^[77] Analysis of polls by Charles Stewart, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, shows that there are deep ideological roots involving belief in conspiracies, racial tensions and religion as well as partisanship. He argues:

Among Republicans, conspiracism has a potent effect on embracing election denialism, followed by racial resentment. Among independents, the strongest influences on denialism are Christian nationalism and racial resentment. And, although election denialism is rare among Democrats, what variation does exist is mostly explained by levels of racial resentment.^[78]

Some election experts and historians contend that, left unabated, election denial could further reduce concessions by losing candidates, disrupt the peaceful transfers of power and weaken or even dismantle American democracy.^[79][80] Lisa Bryant, a political science professor at California State University, Fresno, warned of the erosion of trust in the democratic process and the institutions it produces, which might lead to a breakdown in the rule of law if the government (and by extension the laws they create) are not viewed as legitimate.^[81][82]

Following Trump's 2020 loss amid his false allegations of fraud, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive in several states across the country and to take control of the administrative management of elections at the state and local level.^{[83][84][85][86]} Some planned to deploy an "army" of poll workers and lawyers to challenge votes in Democratic districts.^[87][88][89]

The Washington Post reported in June 2024 on indications that county-level Republicans in swing states might be preparing to challenge and delay their certifications of voting results in 2024. Such delays might cause a state to miss deadlines that ensure its electoral college votes are counted in Washington on January 6, 2025. In four state elections since 2020, county election officials withheld certifications, citing mistrust in voting machines or ballot errors, though they could not produce evidence of actual voting fraud; the certifications proceeded after state interventions, which included warnings of potential (and in Arizona, actual) criminal charges. Voting rights activists were concerned that the continuing false allegations of election fraud since 2020 might lead to social unrest if efforts to delay certifications at the local level were overruled by state officials or courts. The failure of a state to have its electoral college votes counted on January 6 could result in neither presidential candidate reaching the minimum 270 electoral votes, causing the election to be thrown to the House. In that scenario, the election outcome would be determined by a simple majority count of state legislature representations; Republicans controlled 28 of 50 legislatures in 2024.^[90]

Dennis Montgomery promoted widely debunked 'evidence' for both the birther conspiracy theory movement and the 2020 election denial movement (among other far-right conspiracies), was frequently widely cited by supporters of President Trump's efforts to overturn the election.^[91]

By 2022, My Pillow founder Mike Lindell had become a prominent figure in the movement, spending millions of his money for conferences, activist networks, a media platform, legal actions and research. Through his My Pillow advertising placements, he became a major financial backer of an expanding network of right-wing podcasters and influencers.^[92] Lindell's legal firm said in an October 2023 court filing that Lindell was in arrears by millions of dollars in fees and that the firm could no longer afford to represent him, which Lindell confirmed.^[93] Organizations funded by dark money have met quietly with officials in Republican-controlled states to create an incubator of policies that would restrict ballot access and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in elections. Led by the Heritage Foundation, the groups include the Honest Elections Project, which is among a network of conservative organizations associated with Leonard Leo, a longtime prominent figure in the Federalist Society.^[94]

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) was founded in 2017 by former Republican senator and Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint. CPI employs Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark and has been described as the "nerve center" for the MAGA movement. CPI's funding increased from $1.7 million 2017 to $45 million in 2021. CPI includes the Election Integrity Network, led by Cleta Mitchell.^{[95][96][97][98]} Mitchell was a Trump advisor after the 2020 election who participated in the Trump–Raffensperger phone call during which Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to "find" ballots that would secure him a victory in the state. Trump and 18 others, including Meadows and Clark, were indicted in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution for allegedly running a "criminal racketeering enterprise." Mitchell was one of 39 individuals a special grand jury recommended for indictment on multiple charges, though prosecutor Fani Willis declined to charge her.^[99] By 2022, Mitchell said she was "taking the lessons we learned in 2020" as she held seminars around the country to recruit election deniers to monitor elections because "the only way [Democrats] win is to cheat."^[100]

In 2022, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School identified several individuals or groups that together were spending tens of millions to support election deniers in that year's midterm elections. These included the billionaire couple Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein; Trump's Save America PAC; and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne said he spent $20 million to convince people that the 2020 election was stolen; he was also a major funder of the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit that sought but failed to find election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Byrne has been the largest funder of The America Project, which pushes election denial narratives. That group was founded by former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn in 2021, with an agenda that includes undermining trust in elections.^[101][102] Byrne, Flynn and others attended a December 2020 Oval Office meeting with Trump to discuss ways to overturn the president's election loss.^[103]

Oracle Corporation founder Larry Ellison joined a November 2020 conference call with Sean Hannity and Senator Lindsey Graham to discuss ways to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election.^[104] By October 2022, Ellison was donating millions of dollars to a SuperPAC to support four Senate candidates who had cast doubt on the 2020 election results.^[105] The 2022 Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules film falsely alleges unnamed nonprofit organizations associated with the Democratic Party paid "mules" to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in five swing states during the 2020 presidential election.^{[106][107][108][109]}

Some analysts and both Republican and Democratic politicians have suggested that election denial may include an element of grifting to solicit donations from unwitting supporters.^{[110][111][112][113]} With an email campaign, Trump raised about $250 million for what he told donors was an "official election defense fund" that did not actually exist.^[114][115] By September 2022, a federal grand jury was investigating whether Trump and his allies were soliciting donations on the basis of claims they knew were false, which might violate federal wire fraud laws.^[116][117] The Smith special counsel investigation was also examining the fundraising of former Trump attorney Sidney Powell by September 2023.^[118]

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts was asked in June 2024 if Heritage would accept the results of the 2024 presidential election regardless of its outcome. He replied, "Yes, if there isn't massive fraud like there was in 2020." When presented with data from the Heritage Foundation election fraud database indicating there were only 1,513 proven instances of voter fraud in the United States since 1982, Roberts responded that fraud is "very hard to document, and the Democrat party is very good at fraud".^[119][120] In October 2024, some people who had volunteered as fake electors in 2020 were reported to have been chosen as legitimate electors for Trump should he win the November 2024 elections in certain states. Seven states – Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico and Michigan – have 82 electoral votes. Among them are 14 people who volunteered as fake electors in 2020 and 16 additional deniers of the 2020 election.^[121]

• Albertson, Bethany, and Kimberly Guiler. "Conspiracy theories, election rigging, and support for democratic norms." Research & Politics 7.3 (2020): online
• Craig, Maureen A., and Jennifer A. Richeson. "On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America: Perceived Status Threat From the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White Americans’Political Ideology." Psychological Science (2014) 25(6): 1189–97.
• Graham, Matthew H., and Milan W. Svolik. "Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States." American Political Science Review 2020. 114(2): 392–409. online
• Sautter, Chris. "US Democracy Survives a Challenge." in Campaigns and Elections American Style: The changing landscape of political campaigns'ed by Candice J. Nelson, James A. Thurber, and David A. Dulio, (6th ed. Routledge, 2023) pp. 33–51. doi:10.4324/9781003166375-3
• Wu, Jennifer, et al. "Are Dead People Voting By Mail? Evidence From Washington State Administrative Records" (Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research, 2020) summary; Examination of 4.5 million distinct votes in Washington state (2011 to 2018) found 14 cases of individuals whose ballots were cast suspiciously after their death, representing one vote per 300,000.

• "Campaign of fear" investigative series by Reuters on election worker intimidation after 2020