Wisconsin voters line up outside of a Milwaukee polling place on Nov. 5. Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde is one of the Republican politicians who sowed doubt about the integrity of this year’s election. (Andy Manis/Getty Images)
President-elect Donald Trump may have quieted his lies about widespread voter fraud after his win earlier this month, but the impact of his effort to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections lingers on.
Although this post-election period has been markedly calmer than the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, there were isolated flare-ups of 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 spread unsubstantiated rumors about “last-minute” absentee ballots in Milwaukee that he said flipped the outcome of the race. Though he conceded to incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin nearly two weeks after the election, his rhetoric helped stoke a spike in online conspiracy theories. The Milwaukee Election Commission disputed his claims, saying they “lack any merit.”
In North Carolina, Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters last week he feared that the vote-counting process for a state Supreme Court seat was rigged for Democrats. Karen Brinson Bell, the head of the State Board of Elections, skewered Berger for his comments, saying they could inspire violence.
And in Arizona, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who has spent two years disputing her defeat in the 2022 governor’s race, hasn’t acknowledged her Senate loss. While she thanked her supporters in a video posted to X, the platform formerly called Twitter, she stopped short of conceding to Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego.
Republicans’ disinformation campaigns have caused Americans’ confidence in elections to plummet and exposed local election officials to threats and harassment, and some observers worry about a return of the GOP’s destructive rhetoric the next time they lose.
“We have to turn this rhetoric down,” said Jay Young, senior director of voting and democracy for Common Cause, a voting rights group. “There cannot be this continued attack on this institution.”
Still, many politicians who either denied the 2020 election results or criticized their local voting processes won election. In Arizona, for example, voters chose state Rep. Justin Heap, a Republican, to lead the election office in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and the largest jurisdiction in the critical swing state. Heap ran on a “voter confidence” platform and suggested at a Trump rally that Maricopa’s election office is a “national laughingstock.”
Trump tapped former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to oversee the U.S. Department of Justice. Bondi, a Republican, served as an attorney for Trump while he disputed the results in 2020. She could use her position as U.S. attorney general to prosecute election officials involved in that election, as Trump promised in an X post in September.
While the rhetoric around stolen elections has been somewhat muted among the GOP ranks since Trump’s victory, conservatives attempted to flip the “election denial” script on Democrats in at least one race.
We have to turn this rhetoric down.
– Jay Young, Common Cause’s senior director of voting and democracy
In Pennsylvania, Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey refused to concede defeat until last Thursday, two weeks after The Associated Press called the race for Republican challenger David McCormick. Casey lost by fewer than 16,000 votes, less than half a percentage point.
Casey said he wanted to see the results of an automatic recount and various court cases filed on his behalf, but Republicans jumped on his refusal to bow out quickly.
Last week, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who resisted pressure from Trump in 2020 to “find” votes after he lost the state, lambasted Casey for not conceding the Senate race.
“Election denialism needs to end, now,” Raffensperger wrote in a statement. “We are a country of laws and principles, not of men and personalities. Do your job! Follow the law. Accept election results or lose your country.”
Even as Republicans mostly toned down their rhetoric this year, some left-wing social media accounts repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that Starlink, the internet provider owned by billionaire and Trump supporter Elon Musk, changed vote counts.
Those posts, however, aren’t comparable to GOP election denialism, according to the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which fights strategic misinformation.
“While the claims are similar, the rumoring dynamics on the left are markedly different due to the lack of endorsement or amplification by left-leaning influencers, candidates, or party elites,” the center posted last week.
Young, of Common Cause, said it’s clear that election disinformation of any kind has a devastating impact on the local officials tasked with administering the vote.
Threats to election workers continued even after Election Day. Bomb threats were called into election offices in California, Minnesota, Oregon and other states, forcing evacuations as workers were tallying ballots.
But this was just a slice of the onslaught many officials faced over the past four years. Local election officials need the resources to beef up the way they fight disinformation and physical attacks, Young said.
“We should be doing better by them,” he said.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.
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