President-elect Donald Trump may have silenced his lies about widespread voter fraud after his win earlier this month, but his efforts to raise doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections remain.
While the post-election period has been much calmer than the period following the 2020 presidential election, there have been isolated incidents of escalation, with Republican candidates borrowing a page from Trump’s playbook to claim that unsatisfactory election results were illegitimate.
In Wisconsin, Republican U.S. Senate challenger Eric Hovde proliferation unfounded rumors about “last-minute” mail-in ballots in Milwaukee that he believed overturned the outcome of the race. Although he conceded to incumbent Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin nearly two weeks after the election, his rhetoric helped stoke the spike in online conspiracy theories. Milwaukee Board of Elections questioned their claims, claiming they have “no merit.”
In North Carolina, Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger he told reporters last week he feared the vote-counting process for the state Supreme Court seat had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Karen Brinson Bell, head of the State Board of Elections, sharply criticized Berger for his comments, saying they could inspire violence.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Republican Party’s candidate for the US Senate Kari Lake, who for two years questioned her defeat in the 2022 governor’s race. he didn’t admit it her loss in the Senate. While she thanked her supporters video She posted on the X platform, formerly called Twitter, and refrained from conceding to US Democratic Republican Ruben Gallego.
After 4 painful years, hope for normality in American elections
Republicans’ disinformation campaigns have caused Americans’ confidence in the election to plummet and exposed local election officials to threats and harassment, with some observers fearing a return of destructive GOP rhetoric in the event of another loss.
“We need to stop this rhetoric,” said Jay Young, senior director of voting and democracy at Common Cause, a voting rights group. “There cannot be a sustained attack on this institution.”
Yet many politicians who either denied the 2020 election results or criticized their local voting processes won the elections. In Arizona, for example, voters elected Rep. Justin Heap, a Republican, to head the elections office in Maricopa County, the seat of Phoenix and the largest jurisdiction in the critical swing state. Heap ran on a platform of “voter confidence” and suggested at a Trump rally that Maricopa’s election office is a “national laughing stock.”
Trump hired former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to oversee the U.S. Department of Justice. Bondi, republican, he served as a lawyer for Trump while he disputed the 2020 results. She could have used her position as U.S. attorney general to prosecute election officials involved in this election, Trump said he promised in post X in September.
While rhetoric about a stolen election has been somewhat muted in GOP ranks since Trump’s victory, conservatives have tried to reverse the “deny the election” scenario for Democrats in at least one race.
We must silence this rhetoric.
– Jay Young, Senior Director of Voting and Democracy at Common Cause
In Pennsylvania, Democratic Sen. Bob Casey did not concede defeat until last Thursday, two weeks after The Associated Press called the race for Republican challenger David McCormick. Casey lost less than 16,000 votes, or less than half a percentage point.
Casey said he wanted to know the results of the automatic recount and bring various lawsuits on his behalf, but Republicans were quick to respond to his refusal to quickly back down.
Bob Casey is stepping down in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania
Last week, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who resisted Trump’s pressure in 2020 to “find” votes after losing the state, sharply criticized Casey for not agreeing to the Senate race.
However, Kathy Boockvar, president of Athena Strategies and former Pennsylvania Secretary of State, told the Capital-Star that comparisons between the Casey campaign’s actions and Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results are unjustified; under Pennsylvania law, a recount begins automatically when the vote margin falls below 0.5%, as it did in the Casey-McCormick race.
She added that the practice of “calling” elections “has done more damage to the perception of elections than many other things because people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or the Bureau of Decisions calls an election that it has any official significance and it doesn’t,” she said. . “The Associated Press and other election ‘calling’ organizations exist solely to meet people’s need for quick answers in a process that is not designed to be quick for good reasons.”
Even though Republicans have largely toned down their rhetoric this year, some left-wing social media has repeated posts debunked conspiracy theory that Starlink, the internet provider owned by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk, changed the vote count.
According to the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which fights strategic disinformation, these posts cannot be compared to GOP election denial.
“While the claims are similar, the dynamics of gossip on the left are clearly different due to a lack of support or reinforcement from left-wing influencers, candidates or party elites,” the center says. sent last week.
Common Cause’s Young said it’s clear that election misinformation of any kind has a devastating impact on local officials tasked with managing the vote.
Threats against election workers continued even after Election Day. Bomb threats were made to election offices California, Minnesota, Oregon and other states, forcing evacuations while workers counted ballots.
But that was just a sampling of the attacks many officials have faced over the past four years. Young said local elections officials need resources to improve how they combat misinformation and physical attacks.
“We should deal with them better,” he said.
Kim Lyons of the Capital-Star staff contributed.
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