The history of Donald Trump's election conspiracy theories

As the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches its conclusion, polls suggest that the outcome might be among the closest in American history. That could be bad news for the health of the political system since distrust in American election integrity is higher than at any other point since researchers began measuring it. That is largely because of a litany of false claims about the 2020 election made by former President Donald Trump, this year's Republican nominee. Surveys suggest that thanks to this effort, a majority of Republicans now believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, which heightens the risk of post-election turmoil if there is indeed a photo-finish conclusion to this year's race.

The origins of the theories

The seeds for 2020's post-election conspiracy theories were planted in the 2016 election cycle, when Trump refused during the campaign to say that he would accept the outcome if Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was the winner. After his poll-defying, unexpected victory in the Electoral College, Trump then claimed erroneously that he would also have won the popular vote if millions of undocumented immigrants hadn't voted for Clinton. "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," said Trump in a Twitter post on Nov. 27, 2016.

Trump went well beyond those claims in 2020. One piece of Trump's baseless stolen election conspiracy centered on voting machine fraud. According to this theory, which was promoted by Trump and his allies in conservative media, machines systematically switched 2.7 million votes from Trump to Democratic nominee Joe Biden to change the outcome. Fox News, which boosted the conspiracy theory that voting equipment was rigged for Biden, settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems — one prominent target of this speculation — for $787.5 million.

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In both the run-up and aftermath of the election, Trump also claimed that various forms of fraud took place, particularly with mail balloting, a form of advance voting. Many states had expanded opportunities for advance voting due to the unique threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump claimed that election officials in places like Detroit and Philadelphia had boxes of Biden votes "dumped," and that Democrats were "harvesting" mail-in and absentee ballots that were illegitimate. Trump also said that the arduous counting of mail ballots in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which ultimately reversed Trump's leads in votes cast on Election Day, was fraudulent. "Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted," said Trump in a tweet on Nov. 4.

A barrage of lies

Trump also made various other baseless claims, including that illegal ballots were printed overseas and counted, that voting machines were manufactured by the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, that Republican observers were barred from vote-counting areas so that Democrats could commit fraud and that once again millions of undocumented immigrants cast ballots exclusively for Biden.

There have been countless investigations, audits, recounts and analyses of these claims and no credible evidence has ever been produced in support of them. "Trump's claims of fraud or illegality are riddled with errors, hampered by misunderstandings about how to analyze official voter records, and filled with confusion about basic statistical techniques and concepts," said political scientists Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy in a 2024 paper.

While it was Republicans making these claims in 2020, some Democrats believed in the aftermath of the 2004 election that voting machines in Ohio — back then the company in question was called Diebold — changed voter preferences from Democratic nominee John Kerry to incumbent Republican President George W. Bush. Kerry, however, conceded the election the next day and few Democrats objected to the results. This year, Trump has once again spent considerable time stoking fears of a stolen election with similar claims to those he made in 2020.