Trump Spends Election Day Furiously Posting Fraud Conspiracies

Last night, closing out the 2022 midterm election campaign at an Ohio rally with Senate candidate J.D. Vance, Donald Trump sounded confident of massive wins for the GOP.

“This is the year we’re going to take back the House, we’re going to take back the Senate, and take back America,” he predicted, “and in 2024, most importantly, we are going to take back our magnificent White House!”

Still, Trump spent the next day doing all he could to sow distrust in the nation’s election systems, priming Republicans to contest unfavorable results, both this week and in two years should he make another run at the White House. “Protest, Protest, Protest!” he wrote on Truth Social, raising the alarm about what he claimed was a “REALLY BAD” absentee ballot situation in Detroit and alleging people who hadn’t yet voted were being turned away from the polls in the liberal hotbed.

The post is one of several the former president has reeled off since in-person voting got underway on Tuesday, fuming about supposed voting irregularities in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The complaints began over tabulation problems in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where he and his cronies believe fraud occurred in the 2020 election, even though a Republican-led forensic audit showed that Joe Biden defeated him there, contributing to a narrow statewide victory.

Evidently convinced by fear-mongering of MAGA influencers that something nefarious is afoot in Maricopa, Trump alleged that “Voting Machines are not properly working in predominantly Republican/Conservative areas.” Referencing his disproven lies about the 2020 election process in Arizona, he added: “Here we go again?” He continued to harp on the Maricopa situation, calling it a “Voter Integrity DISASTER” and a “Cancer from within,” while hinting that Republican votes had gone uncounted.

There’s no evidence to suggest that conservative areas are more affected by the technical issues, nor that legitimate votes are being discarded. The county’s election chief is a Republican, as is the chair of its board of supervisors.

Trump was more vague about supposed threats to democracy elsewhere around the U.S., complaining that Pennsylvania could take “days” to sort our election results. It’s true that Pennsylvania will likely take extra time to ensure the accuracy of their vote-counting.

Meanwhile, Kristina Karamo, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, had unsuccessfully pushed to disqualify absentee ballots from Detroit. Trump’s call to “Protest, Protest, Protest” seemed to imply, without evidence, that those ballots were fraudulently cast on behalf of unsuspecting citizens who then found themselves unable to vote in person.

Trump had laid enough groundwork at this point to lay out the narrative that everyone expected from him: “Same thing is happening with Voter Fraud as happened in 2020???” he not-so-rhetorically asked, once more invoking the debunked conspiracy theory that Biden’s win was illegitimate. The post is the culmination of his efforts to preemptively challenge the midterm results.

It’s unclear whether Trump will persist in this vein once the candidates he endorsed start winning races. Earlier on Tuesday, he touted the effect of his support for Vance, as well as Dr. Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker, Republicans who ran competitive races for Senate seats representing Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, respectively. By raising the possibility of election interference in those first two states today, Trump may be bracing for losses in both.

But if the aftermath of the 2020 election is any guide, Trump is likely to drop his accusations of fraud and corruption wherever his allies emerge victorious, focusing instead on regions that reveal a strong showing for Democrats. That’s the cardinal rule of GOP election denials: It’s only rigged when the other side comes out on top.