What happened to election fraud? Trump, GOP go quiet on claims after win

During the 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump claimed without evidence that Democratic “cheating” and voter fraud were occurring. When he was declared the winner early Wednesday morning, those claims abruptly ended.

Tuesday afternoon, as votes were being cast, Trump claimed on social media there was “massive cheating” in Philadelphia.

“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” he said on social media. In a separate post he said there was a similar law enforcement response in Detroit.

Law enforcement in both cities scrambled to reassure voters there was no evidence of cheating or fraud.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said Tuesday there was “no factual basis whatsoever” to Trump’s claim.

Trump hasn’t mentioned election fraud since the race was called.

The change in tone after Trump won should drive home that Trump’s fraud claims were not real, said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, which works with Republican and Democratic election officials to strengthen confidence in elections.

“It was never about whether our system was actually secure. It was never about whether or not the election could be trusted or policies that could make an election more secure or not, it was just about the outcome,” he said.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden echoed that sentiment when he said Americans should lay to rest questions about the integrity of elections after Trump decidedly won the 2024 race.

“I hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electorate system. It is honest, it is fair and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose,” Biden said in remarks from the Rose Garden.

Claire Zunk, the RNC’s Election Integrity Communications Director didn’t answer questions about why Trump stopped talking about fraud and if he still believes it occurred, but instead provided a statement praising the RNC’s work.

“President Trump brought attention to real issues in our election system on and before Election Day, and we are continuing to be vigilant and responsive on the ground,” Zunk said in a statement. “That’s exactly why the RNC and Trump Campaign built an unprecedented election integrity program – so we could fix the problems before the election, and be ready to act as votes were being cast and counted. We responded in real time, stopped threats to our election, and protected legal votes.”

Aspersions on Pennsylvania and Michigan, until Trump won them

In a Pennsylvania rally the day before the election, Trump spent 20 minutes warning the crowd there would be fraud in the state.

“They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing,” he said. “Look at what’s going on in your state, every day they’re talking about extending hours; whoever heard of this stuff?”

Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani told reporters on Election Day that “if there isn’t fraud in Philadelphia and Detroit there is no election, they do it even when they don’t have to to stay in practice.”

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have not challenged the results in Philadelphia, where Trump got 20% of the vote, or in Detroit, where he got about 8% of the vote. Results are not final until they are certified by the state.

Trump’s history of baseless fraud claims

This isn’t the first time Trump has claimed . In the 2016 primaries, Trump accused his fellow Republican Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) of “fraud” when Cruz won the Iowa caucuses. In Colorado, he called the primary “rigged.” In the general election, when he won the Electoral College but failed to win the popular vote, he began making claims of fraud more consistently, all while not providing evidence to back them up.

“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he said on social media − without providing any proof.

Trump’s repeatedly debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him was a major part of his 2024 campaign, often featured in his rally speeches. This year, his campaign and the Republican National Committee filed a combined 175 lawsuits before the election over issues such as claiming noncitizens were on the voter rolls, in what many saw as an effort to lay the groundwork for challenging the election’s results.

A hope that Trump’s win calms his supporters

Polls showed that many Trump supporters were far more likely than supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris to believe the election would feature fraud.

Becker said he hopes Trump’s win will begin “some restoration of sanity” around whether American elections are safe and secure.

“The idea that people could believe the lie, which is ludicrous on its face, that Joe Biden as a candidate somehow rigged an election when Trump was the President of the United States and controlled the executive branch, but that as President of the United States, he couldn’t do it, that should reveal the truth about our election system,” Becker said.

Nevertheless, some on the far-right are claiming that Trump’s 2024 win proves that the 2020 election was stolen. They did this by comparing the 80 million votes Biden received in 2020 to the number of votes counted for Vice President Kamala Harris by Wednesday morning, which was closer to 60 million. They claim the 20 million vote discrepancy is proof Democrats cheated in 2020.

But, they are comparing final figures from the 2020 election to partial results from 2024.

Millions of votes cast by mail are still being counted. While the outstanding votes are not enough to change the election’s outcome, the total number of votes Harris and Trump received is not yet official and is expected to increase by several million. For example, as of Friday morning Harris had received more than 69 million votes, compared to the 60 million she had Wednesday morning when the far-right accusations began. Some heavily Democratic states where mail voting is very common like California are still counting ballots.

Conservative media personality Benny Johnson, called the 2020 to 2024 Democratic vote count difference “very sus,” short for suspicious, and failed Ohio Republican congressional candidate J.R. Majewski said the results proved “2020 was stolen.”

“Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024,” Dinesh D’Souza wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday. “Does anyone really believe Biden got 80 million in 2020? Where did those 20 million Democratic voters go? The truth is, they never existed.”

Despite winning in 2016, Trump appointed a panel to investigate election fraud, but then disbanded it abruptly in 2018 after it found no substantive evidence that American elections are corrupt.

On Friday, Trump hinted he might not be done with the election fraud issue. In a Truth Social post attacking California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Trump said “as an “AGENT” for the United States of America on Voting & Elections, I will be DEMANDING THAT VOTER I.D., AND PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP, ARE A NECESSARY PART AND COMPONENT OF THE VOTING PROCESS!”