The 2024 presidential election has set off a new wave of election denialism online — only this time, it is coming from voters on the left.
Much as many supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump did after the 2020 election, some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris are demanding recounts in key states in a bid to verify or even overturn the result. They are scrutinizing election results for signs of tampering, questioning whether election machines flipped votes and wondering whether digital technology could have injected fake votes.
“You know, I don’t agree with Trump on anything, except for this,” said Sandy Summers, a Harris supporter in Baltimore. “Like, yeah, don’t trust the machines. Why should we?”
Unlike 2020, though, the movement this year has nowhere near the organization or support of the Republican “Stop the Steal” campaign. Experts say that is largely because it doesn’t have an influential figurehead, like Mr. Trump was in 2020, to be its champion.
No one in the Democratic Party leadership has embraced the claims, which have been refuted by election officials. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader from New York, said in a statement after the election that he accepted the results and was “proud that the Democratic Party does not believe in election denial.” Ms. Harris has ignored pleas to challenge the result.
“It’s just clear that there’s a whole choir on the right that’s ready to sing,” said Bill Adair, professor of journalism at Duke University and founder of the fact-checking site PolitiFact, referring to supporters of Mr. Trump’s baseless claims. “And that just didn’t exist on the left.”
A post-election poll by Ipsos showed that 63 percent of Democrats thought the election was “legitimate and accurate,” compared with 91 percent of Republicans. In 2020, the trend was reversed, though Republicans were much more doubtful then than Democrats are now. In 2020, 88 percent of Democrats trusted the results compared with just 26 percent of Republicans.
Still, like the right-wing industry that grew out of Mr. Trump’s election denialism in 2020, this year’s claims are minting a new wave of influencers who are devoting themselves to the cause.
One of the most vocal of them is Stephen Spoonamore, a technologist in electronic data security and digital network architecture who has found a large audience for his claims on social media, spurring him to start a newsletter.
“Something’s wrong and I’m a dog on a bone,” said Mr. Spoonamore, who had also questioned the results in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, when Democrats also lost. “I want to live in a democracy, and I’m going to dig until I figure it out.”
An open letter he wrote to Ms. Harris and other Democrats in mid-November quickly spread among the movement’s supporters, earning nearly 2,000 likes on his newly created newsletter. In it, he focused on so-called bullet ballots, votes cast when people include only a choice for president but no other races. His letter included a bevy of calculations that he said demonstrated how what he called ghost voters may have been digitally injected into the process to favor Mr. Trump.
His claims were embraced online, including in Reddit groups followed by tens of thousands of users. Within days, Mr. Spoonamore retracted the bullet ballot idea because publicly available election data easily refuted his calculations. But he did not give up.
“It appears something other than Bullet Ballots is at play,” he wrote in his newsletter.
In the weeks since, Mr. Spoonamore and others have continued floating an assortment of other theories, including what they have called “improbable” election results fueled by possible machine manipulation and actions by the tech mogul Elon Musk or Russian agents that may have disrupted the voting.
“There was no coherent narrative,” said Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager for the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which tracked the spread of this year’s election rumors. The skepticism on the left about the result “was everywhere” on social media, “but it didn’t go viral.”
Mr. Spoonamore has questioned, for instance, the share of voters who supported Mr. Trump for president but selected a Democrat in congressional or state races, breaking from historical norms. In North Carolina, Mr. Trump won the state while the Democratic candidates won the race for governor and attorney general — a quirk he suggested was a sign of fraud. Political experts have pointed instead to flaws in the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, whose campaign was derailed after lurid online messages were uncovered by CNN. Mr. Robinson has denied the claims.
Shiro Kuriwaki, a political science professor at Yale University, said shifts in voting patterns do not necessarily mean anything suspicious occurred, but they can generate confusion and conspiratorial thinking.
“What we would call ‘interesting changes,’ I think they’re calling evidence for fraud,” Dr. Kuriwaki said. “It’s really hard for administrators or researchers to disprove these kind of claims.”
Sandy Summers counts herself among Mr. Spoonamore’s supporters. A nurse in Maryland, she has long questioned the integrity of electronic voting machines, which she says are liable to be hacked. She is now leading Hand Count the Ballots, a group pushing to end the use of electronic voting machines entirely.
“Why is it a ‘conspiracy theory’?” Ms. Summers said. “Is it a conspiracy theory when somebody hacks your bank account or hacks your credit card? We believe in hackers, but why don’t we believe in hackers when it comes to elections?”
All electronic voting machines are subject to audits that follow standards set by the United States Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency. Mr. Spoonamore dismissed that process, saying the companies that conducted the audits were aligned with the voting machine companies.
No evidence ever emerged that any machines produced fraudulent results. Still, the claims persist.
When contacted by The New York Times, a spokeswoman for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency responsible for safeguarding elections, reiterated its initial assessment that there was no evidence of malicious activity affecting this year’s election.
The skeptics say that a hand count of some counties could prove them right, since the paper trail would show any digital alterations.
Nearly every state, however, already has some kind of requirement to audit election results, according to tracking by the Election Assistance Commission. The methods vary, but most audits take a random sample of ballots and compare the results from voting machines to results from paper ballots.
Audits completed in Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia found no discrepancies outside the margin of error expected in a hand recount. All but two counties in Arizona have completed their audits, also finding no issues outside the margin of error. Audits in Michigan and Wisconsin continue.
Similar audits in 2020 did not assuage election deniers then — and it is not clear they will this time.
“I think we are all still in that mindset of trusting in our institutions fully and that elections are, you know, free and fair in this country and that nothing can bastardize them,” said Cynthia Schames, a retired technologist in Chappaqua, N.Y., who started a petition to overturn the results that was eventually taken offline for violating a policy against misinformation. “And unfortunately, I am not 100 percent sure I believe in our institutions anymore.”
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