Election fraud claims go silent after Trump win
Right up to Election Day, Donald Trump and his backers were issuing unfounded warnings of voter fraud. But once his decisive victory took shape, the flood of misinformation slowed to a trickle.
Experts say the recent election has highlighted what Trump critics argue was a preemptive use of fraud claims by him, setting up grounds to contest the results if he lost, much as he did after the 2020 election. Late Tuesday, as votes were tallied, officials in Pennsylvania's largest city denied Trump’s unsubstantiated claim of "massive cheating" in Philadelphia, marking yet another instance of Trump raising fraud concerns.
This pattern dates back to 2020 when Trump’s refusal to accept Biden’s victory led to his supporters violently storming the Capitol. Philip Mai, co-director of Social Media Lab, noted how Republicans’ claims of fraud diminished once votes began to lean in their favor, suggesting these allegations served more as a tactic than a real concern.
The decrease was particularly striking in the "Election Integrity Community" on X, a group launched by Elon Musk’s America PAC. This group shared over 1,000 posts per hour when polls opened but slowed considerably after Trump was declared the winner in some key swing states, with posts dropping to fewer than 100 per hour, according to the National Conference on Citizenship.
Platforms popular among conservatives, including Trump’s own Truth Social, saw similar drops in fraud narratives around the time polls closed, said Welton Chang, co-founder of Pyrra Technologies. Chang noted that as Trump stopped mentioning fraud, so did many of his followers—a "follow the leader effect."
Republican allies also pulled back on fraud claims. Jim Jordan, a close Trump supporter, said on CNN that he believed the election was fair, avoiding the pattern of contesting losses. Trump’s sweeping win across battleground states and his likely capture of the popular vote, which he did not secure in 2016, reinforced this shift.
Notably, while left-leaning circles have raised minor questions about the vote's integrity, there’s been no widespread amplification from Democratic leaders. A hashtag urging Harris not to concede did circulate on X, generating over 30,000 mentions, but researchers say this has remained isolated without leadership or organization backing it.
Danielle Lee Tomson, a research manager at the University of Washington, emphasized that without a leader to galvanize the left’s skepticism, these narratives remain far more scattered than the well-organized fraud discussions led by Trump and his allies. Trump, Tomson said, acts as a “conductor,” orchestrating a media and legal framework to secure his position, a strategy missing from other political groups.