When Trump's victory became clear, online claims of election fraud quieted

By the time the polls opened on Election Day, baseless claims of voter fraud had been building on social media for months, fueling doubts about the integrity of the election. 

Posts proliferated on X and other platforms pointing to hiccups like technical issues with voting machines, power outages and spelling errors on ballots as examples of a supposedly brewing conspiracy. And at 4:30 p.m. on Election Day, former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that there was "a lot of talk about massive cheating" in Pennsylvania — which officials said had "no factual basis whatsoever." 

But as the votes were tallied and it became clear that Trump was on his way to a decisive victory, the deluge of posts questioning the integrity of the election fell to a trickle, researchers say.

"I think this shows that these narratives are pushed when they serve a purpose, and they are stage setting often for efforts to dispute unfavorable results," said Max Read, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. "And then once that stage setting and those claims are no longer needed, they're not pushed anymore."

The shift was stark in Elon Musk's "Election Integrity Community," a group of nearly 65,000 started by the platform owner's political action committee encouraging members to report "voter fraud or irregularities." 

The group had already become a repository for speculation and unfounded rumors before Election Day. When the polls opened, hundreds of posts an hour were shared until the early hours of the morning on Wednesday, when the race was called for Trump in Pennsylvania, all but eliminating a winning path for Vice President Kamala Harris.

After that, the posting drastically diminished. 

Read's team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue also found that mentions across the platform of voting machines in Pennsylvania and Michigan soared on Tuesday afternoon but dropped to hardly any by Wednesday morning. 

On Tuesday morning, a software error caused voting machines to be temporarily down in Cambria County, a county in southwestern Pennsylvania with a population of about 131,000. Voters used paper ballots and a court order extended voting hours from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. But some on social media baselessly suggested the technical issues were something nefarious, a plot to discard votes in a county Trump won by a wide margin in both of the last two elections.

Danielle Lee Tompson, who leads the Center for an Informed Public's research on election rumors at the University of Washington, said the narrative around Pennsylvania voting machines echoed the conversation around election issues in Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2022. In that election, some ballots were printed with ink too light to be read by tabulators, so they were placed in a secure box and counted separately at the state's election headquarters. Claims that the errors were intentional fueled a lawsuit challenging the results that was later dismissed.

"On Election Day, we can always expect there to be irregularities or glitches or problems at polling sites," Tompson said. "The question is will those issues be contorted into a larger narrative that election fraud is happening."

While the volume of election rumors has drastically decreased, false claims are still spreading about races that have not yet been called. In Arizona, where Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake trails Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego, social users on the right are using the fact that Gallego had more votes than Harris by Friday to cast doubt on the validity of his lead. 

Meanwhile, turnout numbers are being twisted by both the left and the right to cast doubt on election results. While millions of votes are still being counted, some point to higher turnout in 2020 as evidence that there are 20 million "missing votes." On the right, some claim this is evidence that 2020 was stolen from Trump; on the left, some say it's grounds for a recount. 

But the volume of posts questioning Harris's loss was nowhere near the "Stop the Steal" efforts that followed Trump's 2020 election loss, according to both Tompson and Read's research. No elected officials cast doubt on the outcome the way Trump pushed election denial when he lost in 2020. Harris urged all Americans to accept the results of the election in her concession speech on Wednesday.

"A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results," Harris said. "And anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it."