President Donald Trump and his allies have spent the final weeks before the midterms showering his supporters with a relentless stream of doubt about the legitimacy of the election, priming them to question results if Republicans lose.
In court, the administration is telegraphing its readiness to challenge results based on alleged fraud. In podcasts and social media posts that are delivered nonstop to Trump’s core backers, right-wing influencers are telling supporters to expect cheating.
Nearly 600 high-profile, right-wing social media accounts, podcasts and other online media have published more than 7,000 statements questioning the election’s integrity so far this year, a Washington Post analysis found. That messaging has, in particular, pushed overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud — themes that are twice as prevalent as they were during the 2024 election cycle, The Post’s analysis found.
Voting by noncitizens is rare, as is fraud involving mail ballots. Most cases involve small numbers of votes, not the large number that would be needed to change election outcomes. And those few perpetrators typically face criminal charges.
The focus on noncitizens and state voter rolls appears to have overtaken claims about voting machines that were prominently pushed by conservatives in past elections. Assertions that voting machines rigged elections have fallen apart in court, and Fox News reached a $787.5 million defamation settlement in 2023 with Dominion Voting Systems after it aired false statements about its equipment.
Allegations about voting machines and vote-counting procedures still linger, and some Trump supports are demanding that states be forced to hand-count ballots. But these arguments have been largely supplanted by discussion of noncitizen voting.
“BOMBSHELL: Trump exposed that 20,000 noncitizens flagged on California’s rolls are just ONE batch!” read a post Friday on X from Ryan Fournier, the founder of Students for Trump, who has 1.2 million followers. He was responding to a lawsuit from the Justice Department that election officials have called deeply flawed.
On his podcast Bannon’s War Room in September, former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon claimed that Democrats are committed to ensuring “illegal aliens can vote en masse.” “They understand that if you restrict it to American citizens, it’s impossible for them to win. They have to cheat to win,” he said.
On Saturday, right-wing podcaster and online commentator David Freeman, who goes by Gunther Eagleman on X, postedto his 1.7 million followers that “19 noncitizens were charged in two swing states in one day, and Democrats still swear this never happens.” Freeman, who also has 1.3 million subscribers to his YouTube podcast, has posted more than 200 times this year questioning election policies.
And Bill Mitchell, a longtime MAGA influencer with a half-million followers on X, has posted about election fraud nearly 150 times this year, The Post found. Last month, he wrote that the root of voter fraud is mail-in ballots and asserted, “I think voter fraud is the ONLY way Democrats ever win swing districts.”
Voting by noncitizens is illegal and, despite Trump’s claims, it rarely happens.
After initially claiming as many as 16,000 noncitizens were on the voter rolls in Nevada, the administration sent a list of just 185 names to state officials, who quickly determined all 185 were citizens. Georgia’s secretary of state this year identified 432 possible noncitizens on its rolls over 30 years — a fraction of a percentage point in a pool of millions of voters.
One of the most cited recent cases was in New Jersey, where this summer officials reported that a software glitch in the state’s motor vehicles department registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote, including about 340 who cast ballots. The state has since removed them from the voter rolls.
The Trump-backed efforts appear to be both tapping into doubts among his base and fueling them. A Pew Research Center surveythis month found that just 45 percent of Americans who back Republican candidates are confident that noncitizens will be prevented from casting ballots, compared to 90 percent of those who back Democrats.
Trump has questioned election results ever since 2016, when he won the presidency but lost the popular vote and alleged that more than 3 million people voted illegally. Four years later, his election denials led to a barrage of lawsuits, all unsuccessful, and a violent attack on the Capitol.
During his second term, Trump has made nearly 300 statements in speeches, press remarks and online that question the integrity of elections, including claims that previous elections were rigged, noncitizens are voting and mail-in ballots enable fraud, The Post’s analysis found. On Monday, he promised $1 million for anyone reporting voter fraud in the midterm or past elections that lead to a conviction, an offer that was amplified by the White House and outside allies.
In the lead-up to midterms, Trump has been especially focused on voter ID and mail-in ballot claims, mentioning those topics six times more often in 2026 than he did in 2025. And he’s alarmed many by refusing to rule out the idea of sending immigration or military officials to the polls.
“I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” he said in May when asked about sending the National Guard or immigration officers to voting locations. “We have to have honest elections.”
A surveythis month by The Post, ABC News and Ipsos found just 28 percent of Americans are confident Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose.
Veterans of post-election battles are braced for a flood of litigation almost as soon as polls close next Tuesday. Already the Justice Department has filed lawsuits seeking to set aside more than 20,000 ballots in California, claiming these voters are not citizens. It’s an unproven allegation and a federal appeals court declined the government’s case on Monday, but right-wing influencers have seized upon the idea.
And the Justice Department has asked a court to prevent the certification of results in Alaska if the Republican loses, arguing that it would be because voters were confused by an independent with the very similar name.
On Friday, Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, said on Xthat the agency is sending more election observers to polling places than ever before and warned that officials “will be eyes and ears for any violations, and may take legal action afterwards. Stay tuned!”
Justice Department monitors are deployed in every election, typically without controversy to observe voting, ensure election laws are followed and protect voters’ rights. But some Democrats have been alarmed by Dhillon’s characterizations, and in August, the Republican governor of Wyoming voiced concern that monitors’ conduct during the state’s primary election was “aggressive” and “irregular” after they asked to examine voting machines.
Ben Hovland, who was fired this year by Trump from his position on the federal Election Assistance Commission and is now a senior fellow at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, expects to see GOP-driven litigation post-election. He noted that Trump and his backers filed more than five dozen lawsuits after he lost the 2020 election, and some local officials who backed Trump tried to block certification of the results.
This year, Hovland predicted, “instead of Trump’s campaign lawyers going to court it will be the Department of Justice acting as the administration’s personal law firm and suing various states or trying to challenge certification or outcome or results.”
Democrats push back
The aggressive posture from the right has prompted Democrats, too, to prepare for a contested election. The Post’s analysis found that Democrats are pushing back online with their messages about the election far more aggressively than in the past.
So far this year, the left-wing response has outpaced the increases on the right: Left-wing statements opposing these narratives more than doubled compared to the 2024 cycle, a faster increase than in right-wing election integrity claims overall, The Post’s analysis found.
Anticipating interference, Democratic congressional leaders have run a series of tabletop exercises aimed at predicting how election challenges may unfold and how they can respond.
“We have come up with 162 different ways Republicans can try to mess with the elections,” Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said at an event Friday in New Jersey.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees, said last week that they expect Trump to challenge the election outcome and are preparing contingencies.
“We’re making the presumption that the president will not accept the results,” Himes told reporters. Instead, the expectation is that Trump “is going to pull out all the stops,” he said.
One concern is that Trump, if the election appears to be going poorly for Republicans, will claim that secret intelligence shows a foreign power, such as China, interfered in the vote tabulation, the Democratic lawmakers said.
Classified U.S. intelligence reports show that Russia, China and Iran are trying to influence the elections via artificial intelligence-driven social media campaigns, but there has been no evidence presented showing foreign actors can or will intervene in voting.
Should Trump make such a claim, Himes said, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton have agreed to confer with him and Warner about any U.S. intelligence underlying the president’s allegations. Such a conversation would allow Warner and Himes, and perhaps other intelligence committee members, to publicly address — at least in general terms — whether there is any basis to White House claims.
In addition, Warner said that 75 voting rights groups, which are “fully lawyered up,” have been meeting regularly to plan for contingencies.
In addition, The Post reportedthat a small group of U.S. national security officials has been discreetly advising state governments and congressional lawmakers on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in the election.
Another concern is that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana) might try to prevent some Democrats from being seated if the party wins the majority.
In hopes of staving that off, two House members, Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) and Don Bacon (R-Nebraska), are circulating a letter asking members to pledge to recognize election winners certified by each state and oppose “any attempt to refuse or delay the seating of any Member-elect.” Gottheimer said Friday that 17 members have signed.
Himes said that current Clerk of the House Kevin McCumber, whose job it is to assemble the roll of new members, understands that is only a procedural task. If Johnson tries to fire McCumber in the days leading up to the seating of the new House, he said, that is “a ‘break glass’ scenario for us.”
Warren P. Strobel, Ian Duncan and Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.
Methodology
The Post used AI to classify social media posts, podcast transcripts and other online statements from high-profile politicians, pundits, podcasters, influencers and other influential accounts. The Post also analyzed data from Factbase on public remarks, speeches, press conferences and other in-person statements made by Trump. The Post used a large language model, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna, to sort the data into election security-related topics. This classifier had an accuracy rate of over 97 percent on a human-labeled test set of over 200 statements.
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