Election denialism is still a threat

Under indictment in New York, former President Donald Trump has fallen back on his favorite false narrative — “rigged elections.” He has doubled down on his baseless lies with more charges potentially on the way.

This comes as signs are showing that Trump’s grip on the Republican Party may be loosening. More rivals for the GOP nomination continue to enter the field.

Candidates espousing the big lie about the 2020 election did not fare well in the midterms. After their unexpected poor showing, some pundits declared the existential threat posed by election denialism vanquished. Not so fast.

There is a reason for optimism: 44% of voters in the 2022 midterms named democracy a top issue on their minds and came out in large numbers to thwart election-denier candidates for many positions with control over elections, including secretary of state, governor and attorney general. However, The New York Times found 220 election deniers made it into office. Additionally, while polls seem to show decreased interest in election denialism, that doesn’t necessarily correlate with legislative pushes to restrict the vote in the 22 states controlled by Republicans. The reason? These Republicans are facing conspiracy-fueled pressures from a faction of their party to restrict voting.

False claims by Trump and his allies helped lead to an unprecedented number of voter suppression bills in 2021 and 2022. This year, similar lies are being used to justify dozens of similar bills nationwide. In a telling quote, a Nebraska legislator — who introduced a voter-suppression bill that didn’t claim widespread fraud — said, “But the perception is — there is. … And perception is reality.”

Election conspiracies create the foundation for further voter restrictions and can be the basis for decisions on election administration if election deniers are involved. For example, a majority of the Shasta County, Calif., Board of Supervisors voted to end their contract with Dominion Voting Systems due to disinformation about voting machines: “Just because we’re all sitting up here and elected does not mean we had free and fair elections every single time,” said one supervisor. The county is now pursuing hand counts of votes, something the local elections office has warned may be impossible to complete in time with California’s reporting requirements. Any delay in certification would then provide an opportunity for more election lies.

Election disinformation continues to damage voters’ faith in democracy. We’ve seen this through Common Cause’s Social Media Monitoring program, where our volunteers look for and flag viral, emerging false narratives about voting and elections on a multitude of social media platforms. We collect this content so that we can escalate harmful posts to the platforms for removal and work with allies to ensure voters are receiving correct information. In our work, we’ve seen widespread confusion over the most secure method of voting, what it means to count votes, and even how our democracy works. Before the midterms, only 47% of voters polled said that they trusted votes would be counted accurately.

As long as election denial is politically expedient or lucrative, it will remain attractive. Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake raised $2.5 million after

Election Day. And some false narratives are now baked into the election process: Last year’s Georgia Senate runoff experienced typical disinformation narratives — false claims about election results that were “projected early,” and conspiracy theories that fluctuating vote counts are due to fraud.

The lifting of bans on Trump by Twitter and Facebook hammers home the point that there is little interest from social media platforms in combating election disinformation. The platforms are scaling back content moderation at a time when consistent enforcement of civic integrity policies can be most impactful. The next year is pivotal, not just in state legislatures but for people’s attitudes toward democracy and the information they receive about it.

Before the midterms, we led more than 120 organizations in demanding social media platforms strengthen and consistently enforce their civic integrity policies and increase transparency for researchers and civil society advocates. Implementing these recommendations would be an effective way to combat disinformation. At the same time, Congress can use its oversight and investigatory authority to continue shining a light on how disinformation and other harmful content is spread and amplified on social media.

At Common Cause, we will keep fighting election disinformation and hold vote suppressors accountable for spreading harmful claims about our democracy — because, unfortunately, Trump is not yet just a voice in the wilderness.