FACT FOCUS: False claims of rigged elections are limited as midterm vote heavily favors Democrats
WASHINGTON (AP) — After President Donald Trump said he would accept the results of his party’s midterm rout, many of his loyalists followed suit even though they, too, are always a hair trigger away from branding a losing election rigged.
To be sure, there were diehards on social media. “This is how the Left steals elections,” Katie Miller, wife of Trump aide Stephen Miller, posted of the equipment malfunction that delayed ballot counting in Westchester County, New York, on Tuesday. Posted far-right activist Laura Loomer: “Of course. Democrats love cheating.”
Yet across the country, great numbers of defeated Republican candidates conceded, congratulated their Democratic opponents in moments of grace and bowed to their fate.
While there were the same typical voting problems that show up every Election Day, there was little conspiracy theorists could use to offset the massive Democratic victories. Most notably, there was no day-after wave of court actions challenging the outcome, despite the Trump Justice Department's laying of preelection groundwork to do just that.
Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York conceded his race before thousands of set-aside Westchester County ballots were even counted, intent on tamping down the conspiracy theories that others were floating to explain his loss in that district. “No shenanigans,” he assured supporters. He said it was obvious his totals would fall short in any event.
Rogan O’Handley, who posts conservative political commentary online as DC_Draino, has been “banging the drum of rigged and stolen elections since 2020,” by his own words. Not this time. “We lost because we failed to fix the things voters sent us to do,” he posted.
He asserted that “election fraud” surely unfolded but “not enough to explain what happened.”
Nor did Elon Musk, the Republican mega-donor and SpaceX chief, deny the reality Americans woke up to Wednesday — of Democrats seizing control of the Senate and House and capturing key governorships, including in Texas, where Musk spent millions to support the GOP.
“Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” he cracked on X.
Misinformation experts have multiple theories about why election denial claims have not spread as widely this time. One is the scale of the Democrats' success.
People see “a lot of enthusiasm on the left,” said Jen Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies conspiracy theories. “They see all of these races moving that way across the country in places that you never would have expected.” And it's "really hard to say every single place cheated.”
However, scale hasn't stopped Trump from alleging fraud without evidence before.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, pointed out that the president has claimed to have won elections where his preferred candidates lost by large margins.
“I don’t know necessarily that margin of victory makes much difference to those who have profited off of the economy of grift around election conspiracies for quite some time,” he said. “It might be that politics overall in the nation have changed to some degree, and that creates a different incentive structure.”
It's also possible Trump's acceptance of the results set the tone for others.
With Trump conceding Democrats had won, no one else of stature stood up to validate the concerns of those who thought they saw fraud, said Danielle Lee Tomson, who studies election rumors at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. "Something that we’d seen in past elections is that Trump had validated those election fraud concerns and considerations and amplified them. This time he didn’t.”
But Golbeck said she didn't see any discussion of Trump's response in “hardcore MAGA forums.” Many seemed aware a blue wave was likely and believed Democrats could win without cheating, she said.
Nathan Walter, an associate professor at Northwestern University who studies misinformation, said election deniers may also be finding that such claims no longer get as much attention on social media. They need to be new and exciting to go viral, he said.
Still, election watchdogs found plenty of conspiratorial buzz online.
The Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington reported that posts on X about malfunctioning machines were coming about 150 times a minute just after 10 a.m. in the East on Wednesday, many “with a conspiratorial framing.”
Noting an uptick in posts citing cheating, stealing and rigging, the group All Voting is Local said the problems in Westchester County “did not help.”
Because of a programming glitch, machines at sites across that county would not accept paper ballots when polls opened. Voters were instructed to put completed ballots in bags that would be safeguarded to be processed later.
As the contours of the Democratic blowout were still taking shape Tuesday night, a variety of demonstrably false allegations of fraud circulated online.
Among them were claims that an FBI raid at a storage locker warehouse in Houston on Monday uncovered more than 20,000 fraudulent ballots for Democratic candidates. That did not happen.
“FBI Houston is aware of social media posts claiming the office conducted an election-related ‘raid’ that ‘uncovered fraudulent ballots’ on November 2, 2026,” the agency wrote in a statement. “That information is false and no election-related operation occurred.”
The claim was first made by a social media user who included three photos that had nothing to do with the alleged fraud but were used to try to support the accusation. In addition, a poll worker in Rogers, Minnesota, was accused of mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk by wearing a T-shirt splattered with fake blood that said “Problem Solved."
The shirt said nothing about Kirk. City officials said the woman wore the shirt in the spirit of Halloween and is a Republican.
___
Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
© Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
