How baseless claims of widespread voter fraud helped mobilize rioters to storm the Capitol

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In the wake of a riot that disrupted Congress on Wednesday in the U.S. Capitol, an action some have called an attack on democracy, many are now asking why it happened.

Christopher Gunn, an attorney and Washburn University professor of law, said it boils down to rhetoric from president, who has consistently claimed the the election was rigged, vote counts were fraudulent and his second term was stolen.

Despite dozens of legal challenges regarding the 2020 election that were tossed out of state and federal courts, many of Trump’s supporters continue to believe his debunked claims of widespread voter fraud.

“If you say something out loud and repeat it enough times, not only do you start to believe it, but everyone else around you will start to believe it as well,” Gunn said. “That plays into group-think and mob mentality and that could be, at least psychologically or sociologically, an explanation for what happened with the interaction yesterday at the Capitol.“

Gunn reiterated that filing legal cases does not mean any evidence to support those claims was found.

“In Pennsylvania alone, over a dozen cases (were) filed and every one of them the courts have said there is no proof that voter fraud has occurred,” Gunn said.

Some of the cases were thrown out by federal judges Trump himself appointed. The U.S. Supreme Court, which includes three Trump picks, declined to hear a challenge from Pennsylvania.

But that begs the question, why then did thousands of people who are convinced Trump is right and that Gunn is wrong take part in Wednesday’s deadly violence?

“Because it fits a broader narrative that they hold which is that the people elected Donald Trump as their president four years ago and all of a sudden that has flip-turned,” Gunn said. “It eventually pays a negative dividend down the road and yesterday was kind of ‘it’ in a microcosm. … The separation from reality, dismissed understanding of how the law works, just breeds into this determination that something nefarious and wrong has happened, because the outcome that was expected didn’t happen.“

From a larger perspective of trying to understand what this all means for the nation, Gunn said it shows that “we are a deeply divided nation and that our politics have veered away from the method by which we govern ourselves to the method by which we identify ourselves.”