Some Democratic voters engage in Republicans’ 2020 election skepticism
A few Democratic voters are denying the results of the 2024 election, engaging in election denialism Republicans were criticized for entertaining four years ago.
A small number of Vice President Kamala Harris’s supporters have sought recounts in swing states in an effort to verify or overturn the results. They are looking at state election results for signs of tampering, questioning whether election machines flipped votes, and remain curious whether digital technology could have created fake votes, according to the New York Times.
“Something’s wrong and I’m a dog on a bone,” said Stephen Spoonamore, who has questioned the results of other elections Republicans won in 2000 and 2004. “I want to live in a democracy, and I’m going to dig until I figure it out.”
Unlike in 2020, when several Republican lawmakers voiced support for then-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, Democrats are trying to tamp down calls they should push to overturn the results.
There are no elected Democratic officials in the White House, House, or Senate engaging in these talks. After the 2020 election and the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attacks, 147 Republican lawmakers voted to overturn the election results in multiple swing states.
Spoonamore wrote an open letter to Harris and other Democrats in mid-November that garnered some attention among Democratic election deniers. He wrote about “bullet ballots,” which are votes cast when people include only a choice for president but no other races.
He was forced to recant his bullet-ballot idea when public election data showed his theory and own complicated calculations were easily disproven. Despite the misstep, he has remained skeptical about the share of voters who went for Trump when other Democrats won statewide races.
For example, in North Carolina, Trump won the state while the Democratic candidates won the races for governor and attorney general. Spoonamore used these results to suggest voter fraud, but political experts point to weak Republican candidates, such as Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, whose campaign, already on shaky grounds, derailed after CNN reported he had called himself a “black NAZI!” and made other unsavory statements in online forums.
Sandy Summers categorizes herself as one of Spoonamore’s supporters. She has long questioned the integrity of electronic voting machines, which she believes are liable to be hacked. She leads a group called “Hand Count the Ballots,” which pushes to end the use of electronic voting machines overall.
“Why is it a ‘conspiracy theory’?” Summers said. “Is it a conspiracy theory when somebody hacks your bank account or hacks your credit card? We believe in hackers, but why don’t we believe in hackers when it comes to elections?”
Audits in the swing states of Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, as audits similarly proved in 2020. Save for two counties that still have audits, Arizona has found no evidence of widespread problems. Audits in Michigan and Wisconsin remain ongoing.
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According to a postelection poll by Ipsos, 63% of Democrats saw the last election as “legitimate and accurate,” compared with 91% of Republicans who said the same. In 2020, the trend was reversed, with Republicans being much more skeptical then than Democrats are now. In 2020, 88% of Democrats had faith in the results, compared with just 26% of Republicans.
Before the 2024 election and even before mail-in ballots were sent out, Trump frequently claimed without proof there was voter fraud in Pennsylvania. He has since dropped those claims following his win.
