The conspiracy theory emerged before the race was even called. I was standing among a crowd of Trump supporters outside the Versailles bakery in Little Havana, a heavily Cuban district of Miami. It was a little after midnight. All around me, people were dancing, drinking potently sweet café con leche and waving Trump flags, as passing cars and trucks blared their horns in support.
I was waiting to go on air for Channel 4’s overnight election special. In my earpiece I could hear a guest speaking from their studio in Washington DC.
“When you look at the numbers on the board—Joe Biden won with 81m votes [in 2020]. Where did those voters go? Where are they?”
The speaker was George Santos, a Donald Trump-supporting former congressman who was elected in 2022 and expelled from the House the following year after being accused, among other things, of fabricating his life story. (Santos now faces jail after admitting wire fraud and identity theft.)
“It does not look like Vice President Harris is going to get 81m votes. Where are those people?” he asked.
There are obvious flaws in this argument: turnout can go down as well as up; it seems logical that a losing candidate would win fewer votes than a winning one; and, crucially, as Santos was speaking, the votes were still being counted. (We now know that Kamala Harris almost won 73m votes, compared to Trump’s nearly 76m.)
This was the sound of an already highly implausible narrative—that the 2020 election was stolen by a massive deep state operation—hitting the buffers of a hard fact. Even the most impressionable Maga supporter cannot ignore that the same state elections apparatus (now under a Democrat administration) has just presided over a resounding victory for Trump.
One of the hallmarks of a hardened conspiracy theorist is that when they are presented with evidence that appears to contradict their narrative, they interpret it as yet more confirmation of diabolical forces at work. A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in the days before the election found that a mere 30 per cent of Republicans said they believed Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.
That belief was fuelled by four years of relentless propaganda from Trump and his allies, insinuating that the Democrats would stop at nothing to maintain their grip on power. It may indeed have contributed to Trump’s victory this time around, as his supporters flocked to the polls, hoping to make his margin of victory “too big to rig”.
Interestingly, the same “deficit” in the popular vote count was seized upon by some supporters of Harris as proof of a Republican plot to steal Democrat votes, which goes to show that it’s not just the right that is prone to fanciful ideas about vote rigging when an election result doesn’t go their way. Lest we forget, during much of Trump’s first term in office, the centre-left in America was consumed by the idea that Trump was a Russian agent, a Kremlin puppet tainted by elusive “kompromat”, a conspiracy theory by any definition.
The “missing votes” narrative isn’t likely to gain much traction this time around. Unlike Trump in 2020, Harris has conceded defeat. Although some of her supporters continue to question the results on social media, neither senior Democrats nor their supporters in the press have given any credence to the idea.
As for Republicans, the stream of speculation about election fraud—which had been building in the run-up to polling day—slowed to a trickle in the early hours of election night, as the scale of Trump’s victory became clear.
In that sense, the result of the 2024 presidential election might be a good thing for democracy. Perhaps the corrosive narrative that America’s electoral system is riddled with fraud will simply disappear. Perhaps, in four years’ time, Americans can look forward to an election where two sides argue vigorously over policy based on a shared factual frame of reference and then both agree to accept the outcome, just like it was in the good old days.
Or perhaps not. Over the past four years, Trump and his allies have built up a vast “election integrity” infrastructure, teams of activists and “citizen investigators”, whose mission has been to take control of the mechanics of elections from the bottom up. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief of staff, called it the “precinct strategy”, urging listeners to his conspiratorially inflected podcast, War Room, to flood the lower ranks of the Republican party.
Precinct officers can choose poll workers, influence how elections are run, and help select members of local boards that oversee elections. There is little doubt that, had the outcome gone against Trump last week, these teams would now be busy challenging the results in court, pushing to decertify vote counts and sowing further doubt about the integrity of the electoral process.
This movement will not vanish overnight. These activist election workers are now embedded in the political system, ready to challenge the next poll that does not go their way. As the Democrats lick their wounds and think about rebuilding their shattered party in the face of losing the presidency, the Senate, and—most likely—the House of Representatives, they face another challenge: how to respond to an opponent who plays by different rules.
