The election denial movement in the United States is a widespread false belief that elections in the United States are rigged and stolen through election fraud by the opposing political party. 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.
Democrats have also engaged in this movement, although to a smaller extent, with some contesting the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and the 2024 United States presidential election, alleging they were stolen by Republicans.
Context 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.
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 1980 speech, "I don't want everybody to vote ... our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Aspects of election denialism have been noted to relate to the great replacement theory, which has been embraced by some Republican politicians to demonstrate their loyalty to Donald Trump. Trump has falsely claimed that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration to allow noncitizens to vote and create a permanent Democratic majority.
Prevalence of voter fraud
Election experts have found that election fraud is vanishingly rare, not systemic, and not at levels that could have impacted a presidential election. 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 voter impersonation fraud rate of 0.0003–0.0025%. 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.
Origins of the movement 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.Andrew Smolar, "How Group Identifications Have Contributed to Our National Discord." Group 47#12 (2023): 115–147. Other dates that have been suggested for the start of this movement include 2012, 2016, and 2020.
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.Chris Sautter, "U.S. Elections on the Brink," in Candice J. Nelson and James A. Thurber, eds., Campaigns and elections American style: The changing landscape of political campaigns (5th ed., Routledge, 2018) pp. 136–159 .
Disputed elections
President
2012 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." The final election results showed Obama won the popular vote by nearly five million ballots. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots. ABC News writer Terrence Smith described Trump's statements as the first example showing a broader playbook of election denial.
2016
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. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump asserted that the only way he could lose was if there was election fraud. 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.
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. 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. 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. Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions. The commission did not find a single instance of a non-citizen voting.
Although Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the 2016 election, she has referred to Trump as "an illegitimate president." In a 2019 speech in Los Angeles she spoke about the report on Russian interference in the 2016 election saying "You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you." In a 2020 interview with The Atlantic, she maintained that the election was "not on the level".
2020
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.
2024 Republicans
Trump did not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election if he were to lose. 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. According to NPR, the continuation of election denial tactics by Trump for the 2024 election was likely. 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. 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.
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. 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". 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.