Theories of a Conspiracy to Fraud Elections Have Already Flourished on the Internet

So when voters in Oregon learned earlier this month that Democratic Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade had outed Trump and her running mate, JD Vance, on her website, they believed it was part of a ploy to undermine Trump. The story was promoted by right-wing activists and Trump supporters on platforms like X and Instagram and gained so much traction that Griffin-Valade’s office was forced to shut down its phone lines.

The fact is that the Trump campaign had decided not to give a statement to the Online Voter’s Guide of Oregon, unlike the Harris campaign, which is why the name of the vice president was present in the guide.

“The public as a whole is not well equipped to take part in dealing with election fraud,” said Jankowicz.

Similar conspiracy theories about down-ballot races have spread across the country. “It may not be surprising at all, but it’s surprising that we’ve already seen stories of election fraud reminiscent of what we saw four years ago,” Sam Howard, NewsGuard’s political editor, told WIRED. “A baseless claim about vote-changing machines began circulating in Tarrant County, Texas, on the first day of early voting. Similar false narratives about vote tampering began during the first week of early voting in Georgia. The Georgia narrative affected even the Dominion Voting Systems.”

Last week, a viral video emerged purporting to show election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, destroying ballots cast for the former Trump, the very behavior that pro-Trump networks have spent years saying happened in 2020.

Days after the video went viral, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint statement saying they determined the video was part of Russia’s efforts to influence the election results.

“This Russian operation is part of a broader effort by Moscow to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and sow division among the American people,” the organizations said. “On election day and in the weeks and months that follow, i [intelligence community] expects Russia to create and release more media content aimed at undermining trust in election integrity and alienating the American people.”

Many of these new conspiracy theories about voter and election fraud have come from activists at the local level, whose accounts have been reinforced by the integrated network of anti-election groups that have emerged after the 2020 elections. These groups have continued to grow and establish strong links with other tribal groups that are run and supported by some of the most powerful figures in the conservation world.