This is an article from the Fall 2024 Civitas Examiner (Volume 1, No. 2) and was written by one of our students, Benjamin Y. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue. To read more Civitas Examiner stories or to submit your own, click here.
Was there fraud in the 2024 election? This question has remained just as pressing today as it did in the hours directly after polls closed. And this year, it’s coming from both sides of the aisle. Democrats cite possible Russian involvement in the election, the recently leaked files about the “precinct strategy”, and the fact that Trump won every swing state, while Republicans express concern about malfunctioning voting machines, unlocked vote tabulators, undocumented immigrant voting, and ballot stuffing. Some are even saying that the election results from this year prove that the 2024 election was rigged. Both parties seemed concerned about bomb threats centered around swing states.
Generally, the Republicans have the largest social media presence, so we’ll discuss their claims first. One of the most oft-cited claims I came across in my research was that there was no fraud in this election, but that the numbers this year are proof of fraud in 2020. A few posts on X will demonstrate.
11/6/2024 3:21 PM @therealrosanne; reposted 14,771 times:
The funniest thing I’m seeing is Dems saying the election was
rigged because there was huge turnout last night and there
are 20 million less votes for Kamala. lol.
11/6/2024 12:57 PM @DineshDSouza; reposted 33,774 times
Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024. Does anyone really believe
Biden got 80 million in 2020? Where did those 20 million
Democratic votes go? The truth is, they never existed. I think
we can put the lie about Biden’s 80 million votes to rest once
and for all.
Another user, @zerohedge, posted a graph showing popular votes in millions in 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024, the 2020 bar being almost twice as big as the others, proving that 20 million .
However, these arguments are false. The graph, which all the rest of the posts are basing their statistics on, is intentionally misleading. It was published at a time during the election night when the popular vote counted thus far was relatively similar to the 2012 and 2016 results, causing 2020 to look like the odd one out, but if it had been published later, it would have shown that the 2024 turnout was similar to the 2020 one, which means that nothing fraudulent took place: it’s just that people had more motivation to vote those two years. @zerohedge has a history of posting misleading or false graphs, one of these showing an overall downward trend in atmospheric CO2 levels.
Some particularly viral posts described the idea of “mules” being used to sway the election results by ballot stuffing, which is an idea that first gained popularity after the 2020 election. Dinesh D’Souza, the poster of the latter tweet above, made the idea famous with his book and film “2000 Mules” and other, later publications. The concept is as follows: A worker, known as a mule, picks up a large quantity of ballots from a nonprofit, drops them off at a ballot dropbox in the dead of night, and repeats as many times as is necessary to flip the election. However, the moviemakers hired actors to pretend to stuff ballots as they had no actual footage of mules, hiding their credits at the tail end of the movie. They also based their conclusions on inaccurate cell phone tracking data, which would give a positive result if the person in question so much as drove by a polling location. And let’s not forget that the film was funded by and filmed partially in Russia.
Other allegations of voter fraud had to do with undocumented immigrants voting, which has been proven to be unfounded, and malfunctions in voting machines and vote tabulators, in which the situations were resolved with no fraudulent activity taking place.
However, there were also concerns raised by Democrats, saying that the election was rigged against them in two ways: one, that the media about the candidates had been tampered with before the election, using deep-faking technologies or Russia altering the text of legitimate articles, and two, that Trump won every swing state. There is nothing I can do to allay the first of these concerns, as it is a fact that this is happening: AI models are improving and creating increasingly more realistic results, and it may have skewed the results of the election.
For the second of these, I will turn to a set of leaked documents known as the ”precinct strategy”. These detail how the Republican party intends to challenge every submitted ballot in order to stall voting, and could have been used in Democrat-leaning precincts to ensure that by the end of Election Day, lines would still be long and filled with people who were not able to vote. It is hard to pinpoint exactly if and when this happened, as it would masquerade as functioning, unbiased election protocol, but there is a good chance it did.
There is one more important allegation to discuss: the bomb threats. As Election Night wore on, dozens of bomb threats were issued to polling places along the east coast and in other swing states. As the threats were all issued from Russian email domains, this raised obvious concerns about foreign interference. It could not exactly be considered election fraud, as it was not an internal, malevolent effort to alter results, but it most definitely put on pause the workings of a free and fair election until the issue could be resolved and polling hours in the affected areas extended. I would suggest that the FBI conduct a thorough investigation into the sources of the threats and how they can be prevented in the future.
So, was there fraud in the 2024 election? Possibly, but there are numerous safeguards in place to ensure it does not happen, and the answer may also be very subjective (although people are generally in agreement that there was some outside tampering). Just remember to get news from a trusted, unbiased source, and come to your own conclusions about current events. Because, after voting, that really is the most important part of being an informed citizen.
