It took a few days for people who had questioned the integrity of elections for the past two years to find their voices.
Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state who has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election results, first sounded optimistic on Wednesday about this year’s vote count, telling supporters: “We will win if everything has been summed up.”
But by Saturday, after his Democratic rival built a lead of more than 100,000 votes, Mr Finchem took a different stance. “They’re messing with the election numbers,” he wrote on Twitter.
Allegations of voter fraud were not as prominent after this election as they were in 2020. But as the odds dwindled for some Republican candidates in tight races, many false and misleading stories began to gain steam, pushed by Republican candidates such as Mr. Finchem and Kari Lake, who was running for governor in Arizona, and far-right influencers. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Thursday that if the Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada lost his race — the final outcome — then “it’s a lie.”
The talk revived conspiracy theories that had been popular for the past two years but never proven, focusing on dubious claims that Democrats injected bogus ballots into the system or that minor voting glitches on Election Day amounted to widespread fraud. The ideas circulated widely on far-right social media and in videos presented by prominent election deniers, including Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump. On Friday, Mr Lindell posted that the fluctuating vote count in Georgia’s senate race indicated that “the stealing has begun”.
According to Zignal Labs, a company that monitors online activity, there were nearly 600,000 mentions of voter fraud and similar ideas on Twitter in the week following the election.
It seemed unlikely that the allegations would reach the fever pitch of 2020, when many Americans engaged in conspiracy theories pushed by Mr Trump and a constellation of his supporters. According to Zignal data, there were about 95,000 more reports of voter fraud in the weeks following the 2018 midterm elections than this year.
Understand the results of the 2022 midterm elections
But the spate of election fraud stories — in a year when Republicans won seats in the House and defeated many prominent Democrats — demonstrates the idea’s resilience among Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters.
“The grassroots is really involved in claims of election fraud — that hasn’t gone away,” said Michael Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. “They’re still out there, they’re still coming out claim after claim, but they’re struggling to get that to the real opinion leaders.”
Mainstream conservative news organizations like Fox News have not embraced the latest conspiracy theories. Still, some elected Republicans have nevertheless used them to advocate for the unraveling of more permissive voting laws, such as mail-in voting and early voting, that give many Americans easier access to the polls.
“Election Day. Not Election Week,” Ohio Representative Jim Jordan tweeted Monday, echoing a conspiracy theory that a longer voting period gives more opportunity to cheat.
Mr. Trump used his feed on the right-wing social network Truth Social to rally support for the false stories, posting dozens of times that the election was compromised, providing no evidence and suggesting that the Arizona election should be redone because of fraud. His views grew more critical as the Republicans he had supported in tightly contested races seemed on the verge of losing.
“Just another giant election scam,” he wrote Monday. “Wake up America!!!”
Arizona has remained a hotbed of election misinformation and voter fraud claims since Republicans claimed President Biden’s surprise victory there in 2020 was due to fraud.
Mr. Finchem, a state legislator who attended Mr. Trump’s rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and suggested that some votes should be thrown out if they came from counties that were “irretrievably compromised,” last week changed his tone from optimistic to conspiratorially in step with his election fortunes.
On Wednesday, he told supporters that “we are closing soon” and tweeted the hashtag “#NowWeWait”. But after he was expected to lose, he wrote that “we need a MAJOR investigation and I want to see arrests and asset seizures!”
In Arizona, attention has narrowed to a series of technical glitches that disrupted vote counts on Election Day for about one in four polling places in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous district. The people at those locations could still vote by having their ballot paper read out to them later.
Ms. Lake, the candidate for governor, said she chose to vote in a liberal part of Maricopa and claimed, without evidence, that liberal regions had not experienced any problems. But she seemed to give the Election Day problems the benefit of the doubt, attributing them to “mismanagement” and saying, “I hope it wasn’t malice.”
“If you’re potentially the winner, you don’t want to create a lot of confusion about the election,” said Mr. Caulfield. “Because maybe you will be the winner in a few days.”
Ms. Lake’s claims continued to simmer online until Mr. Trump picked them up, erroneously writing on Truth Social that disturbances occurred “only in Republican districts” and that Ms. Lake “must be taken to a Liberal Democratic district” to vote.
“This is a scam and voter fraud, nothing but stuffing the ballot boxes,” he wrote Friday.
Mr. Trump had also tried to inflame his supporters, as he did in 2020, writing that people should “protest, protest, protest!”
Few showed up that evening. But by Saturday, calls for protests grew louder and a small crowd of Republicans gathered outside a polling place in Maricopa County, waving signs that read “Lake won” and “Arrest the traitors.”
“AN NEW ELECTION MUST BE CALLED IMMEDIATELY!” Mr. Trump wrote on Saturday.
Some conspiracy theorists believe that an increase in the number of votes for a candidate is a sign that fraudulent votes have somehow been injected into the system. Instead, more votes take place because ballots are reported in batches, some of which may disproportionately come from highly partisan regions. Ms. Lake had her own vote gain of about 200,000 votes, dramatically narrowing the gap between her and Katie Hobbs, her Democratic rival.
Some candidates also postponed giving up their races. They were applauded by online conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers who demanded that Republicans not concede until alleged election fraud was exposed.
Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania who once hosted a state hearing on voter fraud, gave up the race three days after he was expected to lose to Josh Shapiro, his Democratic opponent.
“We can and must do better to make our elections more transparent, more secure and more quickly decided,” he wrote in a concession statement. “Pennsylvanians deserve to have confidence in our elections.”
