Election denial movement in the United States

Going back decades, some influential people who express concerns around election security have been accused of using the fear of voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression.[6][7] 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 speech in 1980: "I don’t want everybody to vote ... our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."[7]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump asserted that the only way he could lose was if there was election fraud.[8] 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.[9]

Trump also established an election integrity commission in May 2017 after he, without evidence, claimed millions voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, costing him the popular vote victory. 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.[10] 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.[11] Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions.[12][13]

Secretaries of state oversee elections in states. In 2022, nearly one in three Republican candidates for those offices supported overturning the 2020 presidential election results.[14][15] The America First Secretary of State Coalition, co-founded and led by Nevada Republican Jim Marchant, was created in 2021 to promote election deniers for secretary of state in the 2022 United States secretary of state elections.[16] All but one of nearly twenty candidates the group endorsed in 2022 lost in the general election.[17][18] According to analysis by the nonpartisan States United Action, election denialism cost Republican candidates from 2.3 to 3.7 percentage points of votes in the 2022 midterm elections.[19]

Following Trump's 2020 loss amid his false allegations of fraud, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive in several states across the country and to take control of the administrative management of elections at the state and local level. Some planned to deploy an "army" of poll workers and lawyers to challenge votes in Democratic districts.[20][21][22][23] Election experts have found that election fraud is vanishingly rare.[24][25]

By 2022, My Pillow founder Mike Lindell had become a prominent figure in the movement, spending millions of his money for conferences, activist networks, a media platform, legal actions and research. Lindell asserts the 2020 election was stolen through a complex global scheme to hack into voting machines. Through his My Pillow advertising placements, he became a major financial backer of an expanding network of right-wing podcasters and influencers.[26] Lindell's legal firm said in an October 2023 court filing that Lindell was in arrears by millions of dollars in fees and that the firm could no longer afford to represent him. Lindell praised his attorneys for their work, adding, "We've lost everything, every dime. All of it is gone."[27]

Organizations funded by dark money have met quietly with officials in Republican-controlled states to create an incubator of policies that would restrict ballot access and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in elections. Led by the Heritage Foundation, the groups include the Honest Elections Project, which is among a network of conservative organizations associated with Leonard Leo, a longtime prominent figure in the Federalist Society.[28]

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) was founded in 2017 by former Republican senator and Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint. CPI employs Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark and has been described as the "nerve center" for the MAGA movement. CPI's funding increased from $1.7 million 2017 to $45 million in 2021, the last year tax filings were available. CPI includes the Election Integrity Network, led by Cleta Mitchell.[29][30][31][32] Mitchell was a Trump advisor after the 2020 election who participated in the Trump-Raffensperger phone call during which Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to "find" ballots that would secure him a victory in the state. Trump and 18 others, including Meadows and Clark, were indicted in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution for allegedly running a "criminal racketeering enterprise." Mitchell was one of 39 individuals a special grand jury recommended for indictment on multiple charges, though prosecutor Fani Willis declined to charge her.[33] By 2022, Mitchell said she was "taking the lessons we learned in 2020" as she held seminars around the country to recruit election deniers to monitor elections because "the only way [Democrats] win is to cheat."[34]

In 2022, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School identified several individuals or groups that together were spending tens of millions to support election deniers in that year's midterm elections. These included the billionaire couple Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein; Trump's Save America PAC; and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne said he spent $20 million to convince people that the 2020 election was stolen; he was also a major funder of the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit that sought but failed to find election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Byrne is the largest funder of The America Project, which pushes election denial narratives. That group was founded by former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn in 2021, with an agenda that includes undermining trust in elections.[35][36] Byrne, Flynn and others attended a December 2020 Oval Office meeting with Trump to discuss ways to overturn the president's election loss.[37]

Oracle Corporation founder Larry Ellison joined a November 2020 conference call with Sean Hannity and senator Lindsey Graham to discuss ways to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election.[38] By October 2022, Ellison was donating millions of dollars to a SuperPAC to support four Senate candidates who had cast doubt on the 2020 election results.[39]

Some analysts and politicians both Republican and Democrat have suggested that election denial may include an element of grifting to solicit donations from unwitting supporters.[40][41][42][43] With an email campaign, Trump raised about $250 million for what he told donors was an "official election defense fund" that did not actually exist.[44][45] By September 2022, a federal grand jury was investigating whether Trump and his allies were soliciting donations on the basis of claims they knew were false, which might violate federal wire fraud laws.[46][47] The Smith special counsel investigation was also examining the fundraising of former Trump attorney Sidney Powell by September 2023.[48]

Kari Lake made Trump's false allegations of election fraud a centerpiece of her 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election. Like Trump, she refused to concede her loss, traveling the country into 2023 to promote her election fraud allegations amid speculation she was considering a run for Senate or being named as Trump's running mate in 2024. She continued to challenge her loss in court as late as September 2023, after losing previous appeals.[49][50]

The 2022 Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules film alleged unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party paid "mules" to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in five swing states during the 2020 presidential election.[51][52][53][54]

An October 2022 Washington Post analysis found that 51% of Republican nominees for House, Senate and key statewide offices in nearly every state that year denied or questioned the 2020 election outcome.[55] Trump made his election fraud claims a litmus test for Republican candidates and the heart of his platform.[56]

Despite no meaningful evidence of election fraud, as late as August 2023 a large majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents continued to believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.[57]

Sarah Longwell, a Republican political strategist who strongly opposes Trumpism, wrote in April 2022 that she asked Trump voters in focus groups why they continue to believe the election was stolen from him. She perceived that for many it was a hard-to-explain tribal response that is echoed throughout participants' social and media environment.[58]

Some election experts and historians contend that, left unabated, election denial could weaken or even dismantle American democracy. Lisa Bryant, a political science professor at California State University, Fresno, warned of the erosion of trust in the democratic process and the institutions it produces, which might lead to a breakdown in the rule of law. She said, "If you don’t view the government as legitimate, then do you view the laws that it creates as legitimate? And so then are you subject to follow them?"[59][60]