By james art So when Oregon voters heard earlier this month that the state’s Democratic secretary of state, LaVonne Griffin-Valeide, had removed Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, from her website, they believed it was part of a subversion plan. of Trump. The narrative was amplified by right-wing influencers and Trump supporters on platforms like X and Instagram, and gained so much traction that Griffin-Waleid’s office was forced to shut down its phone lines.
The reality is that the Trump campaign had decided not to provide a statement in the online Oregon Voter Guide, unlike the Harris campaign, which is why the vice president’s name was in the guide.
“Society as a whole is much less prepared to be proactive in the face of election lies,” Jankovic says.
Similar conspiracy theories about races with bad votes spread across the country. “It may not be entirely surprising, but it’s striking that we’ve already seen stories of election fraud reminiscent of those we saw four years ago,” Sam Howard, NewsGuard’s political editor, told WIRED. “A baseless allegation of vote-transferring machines began circulating in Tarrant County, Texas, on the first day of early voting. A similar false narrative of vote-switching spread during the first week of early voting in Georgia. The Georgia narrative even includes Dominion voting systems.’
A viral video emerged last week purporting to show election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, destroying mail-in ballots for the former Trump, the very behavior that pro-Trump networks spent years claiming was 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 had determined the video was part of Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of the election .
“This Russian activity is part of a broader effort by Moscow to raise baseless questions about the integrity of US elections and to foment division among Americans,” the agencies said. “In the run-up to Election Day and in the weeks and months afterward, [intelligence community] expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine confidence in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.
Many of these new electoral and electoral fraud conspiracy theories have come from grassroots activists whose accounts are then supplemented by the coordinated network of election denial groups that have emerged since the 2020 election. These groups continue to grow and to establish strong ties with other national groups, managed and supported by some of the influential figures in the conservative world.