Following the US election result, new fronts for false election fraud claims have opened online
By Matt Martino
By Michael Workman
By Lucy Carter
ABC NEWS Verify
Topic:US Elections
Trump supporters have been a large source of false claims about election denial in the past, but following the 2024 election result, Harris supporters began to spread falsehoods also.
Former president Donald Trump has been declared the winner of the 2024 US election and Vice-President Kamala Harris has conceded, setting up the peaceful transition of the US presidency from Democratic hands to Republican early next year.
As celebrations and commiserations continue, millions of Americans seem deeply unsettled by the result, with conspiracy theories taking flight online from both sides — some from predictable sources and others from newly enraged voices.
Mathew Marques is a senior lecturer in psychology at La Trobe University and says he is not surprised to see these kinds of ideas and narratives start to fester.
"Conspiracy theories are appealing ways to explain events and outcomes. Political science probably has the best quote on this — that conspiracy theories are for the losers.
"Post-elections and these sorts of things, conspiracy theories seem to be a nice way for people to make sense of what's happened to them."
ABC NEWS Verify has been looking at some of the false and misleading narratives emerging rapidly online as the world absorbs the election result.
'There are 20 million missing votes'
Confusion about popular vote totals has given partisan accounts ammunition to sow doubt about the election result, with posts questioning the difference between the number of votes cast in 2020 and 2024.
A false claim of voter fraud, this time from a supporter of the Democrats.
As the idea took hold on X, users began to blame Trump and demand that Harris not concede.
Many posts like these, containing false information and with millions of views, could be found on X after the race was called.
There's a very simple explanation though: vote totals at the time these posts were published were much lower than 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden received over 81 million votes and then-president Trump received over 74 million. But that is simply because there was a large portion of the vote still uncounted.
A large portion of the votes yet to be counted are in the west-coast states of California, Washington and Oregon, which have already been claimed for Harris.
In most of the swing states Harris would need to have flipped to claim the presidency, the Associated Press estimates upwards of 98 per cent of the vote has already been counted.
As the AP has called Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia for the Republican nominee, these results are highly unlikely to change.
Dr Marques's research is in the causes and consequences of conspiracy belief structures.
He told ABC NEWS Verify that some people would be attempting to come up with explanations as they grappled with the result.
"People who found the election results unexpected or against what they were hoping for, some may entertain conspiracy theories as a way of understanding what's happening."
Crestfallen Harris supporters were not the only ones using the incomplete 2024 data to infer election fraud.
A counterclaim has also emerged from Trump-supporting accounts questioning the validity of Biden's 2020 election count, even though dozens of lawsuits at the time turned up no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Trump supporters used the preliminary results to make false claims about the 2020 election.
Did Russian interference affect the outcome?
There was evidence of Russian influence operations during the election, but there's no evidence it changed the outcome.
There's emerging evidence some Russian-linked interference did take place in the lead-up to and on election day, however, at this point it appears to have had little impact on the ultimate outcome given Trump's significant overall lead.
On the eve of the election, CNN published allegations that Simeon Boikov, a registered Russian foreign agent holed up in the Russian consulate in Sydney, made payments to a US pro-Trump social media influencer to post a fake video of Haitian immigrants claiming to have voted multiple times for Kamala Harris on X.
Speaking to news.com.au, Boikov described CNN's story as a "nothing burger," but it follows the US Department of Justice in September charging two Russian media executives with funnelling payments to conservative influencers to create content favourable to the Russian regime.
Although findings that Russian-linked entities made payments to right-wing influencers to spread disinformation are concerning, there's as yet no evidence that links this to the widespread swings towards Trump at the ballot.
Left-wing commentators and social media users have also latched into the FBI's announcements that it was aware of several videos claiming to be from the FBI that were spreading falsehoods about the election including claims about malfunctioning voting machines.
The videos and others that pretended to be from news organisations were tracked by BBC Verify, who described them as receiving little attention.
The fake clips were ultimately seen "tens of thousands of times" by accounts that had "few followers" and the accounts spreading the videos on X have since been suspended.
There's currently little evidence of any significant impact on Trump's election victory and, as Olga Robinson of BBC Verify points out, overstating their actual impact risks sending a signal to the Kremlin propagandists to pump out more like them.
On election day, polling sites in several states were targeted by hoax bomb threats that according to the FBI appeared to originate from Russian email domains. The threats reportedly targeted voting locations across the country, including polling stations in battleground states including Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia.
The threats led to the evacuation and brief closure of some polling stations such as two targeted locations in Georgia's Fulton County that were closed for under an hour before voting resumed, according to Reuters.
It is unclear whether the bomb hoaxes were directed by the Kremlin, with the FBI merely describing many of the threats as apparently originating from "Russian email domains", which could have been Russian citizens rather than the government itself.
What these examples have all done is fuel speculation about Russia's ability to "rig" the election in Trump's favour.
Several political commentators, including former MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann, have described the act as "terrorism" and "an act of war" by Russia.
While in time, evidence may surface that proves the Russian regime directed the bomb threats and other interference, at this stage that evidence hasn't yet come to light and the disruptions themselves appear to have had little impact on the election outcome.
Despite victory, conspiracy theories still circulating widely among Trump supporters
Through this campaign, Trump's thoroughly and comprehensively disproven claims of a "stolen" 2020 election were constantly repeated, and he spent huge amounts of time and effort setting up his supporter base to expect Democrats to "steal" this election too.
Early in the vote count, Trump took to his preferred social media platform Truth Social to allege without evidence that "massive CHEATING" was taking place in Philadelphia — a claim that was immediately called out and debunked by the city's district attorney, Larry Krasner.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump made false allegations of voter fraud during the count.
As results came through in his favour, the posts from Mr Trump claiming election fraud dried up. However, many of his supporters, primed to expect a conspiracy, seemed almost confused with the result online.
A long-ingrained false narrative of Democrats' nefarious intent confused some Trump supporters when the race was called for him.
"People's beliefs are resistant to change," said La Trobe University's Dr Marques.
"If you believe that UFOs are coming to take you away, or you believe that the election was stolen or was going to be stolen, then sharing those beliefs or having others around you who believe the same sorts of things are probably fairly important in terms of continuing that belief," he said.
Right-wing conspiracy theories pushing people to start preparing for the election to be "stolen" in 2028 are already starting to do the rounds.
Dr Marques said these constructed narratives will remain attractive for people with eroded trust in democracy and institutions.
"Conspiracy theories allege that there are powerful groups working in secret, doing something malevolent against an unsuspecting public. So the fact that they're fairly widespread, and also I think the fact that they're being expressed by people who are in authoritative positions or leadership positions, make them more salient and more available. And so they become more normative."
By：ABC(责任编辑：admin)
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