Republicans are trying to rig 2024 the way they claim 2020 was rigged

This article has been updated.

There are two theories that allies of Donald Trump promote to assert that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate.

The first is that rampant fraud — maybe with mail-in ballots, maybe from voting machines, maybe both, maybe something else — resulted in Joe Biden earning more votes nationally and in the states he flipped from 2016. This theory suffers from the minor flaw that there is no evidence in favor of it and lots of evidence against it. It also suffers from the secondary flaw that the lack of evidence means that those who most loudly adhere to it are often those with whom reputable people are the least interested in associating.

So the second theory gained traction. It holds that the election was illegitimate because a number of ancillary things shifted the results: late changes to election rules, including some that let more people vote early (meaning, the argument goes, more Democrats); big donors helping fund election administration; social media companies putting their thumb on the scales, including by (briefly) limiting the sharing of a New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter. In short, the election was “rigged” for Biden not by direct cheating but by indirect influence, and that made all the difference.

There are a few benefits here. One is that it’s essentially unfalsifiable; you can’t flatly disprove vague claims about influence. Another is that it separates the presenter from the disreputable characters alleging fraud and from being tied to the already false claims about illegal voting. It also allows you, a Republican and/or Trump supporter, to lament how The System weighed in on behalf of Biden in an unacceptable way.

Such voices are noticeably quiet now that it’s Republicans who are doing the rigging.

In Georgia, for example, the State Election Board passed a new rule last month mandating hand counts of submitted ballots — a rule driven by false claims about election fraud and enacted on the strength of the board’s pro-Trump majority. As ProPublica has noted, the new rule empowers local officials to potentially shift the outcome of the election by excluding pockets of votes offered in favor of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

One of the ways in which the Georgia results were suspect, according to a January 2021 memo written by Trump attorney John Eastman, was a change in rules resulting from a settlement agreement reached in March 2020, seven months before the election.

Other changes in how people were able to cast ballots in swing states were made in response to the coronavirus pandemic that emerged at the beginning of 2020. In the face of that crisis, state officials determined that reducing the need for in-person voting (and potentially spreading the virus) was warranted. Such changes became a focal point of the “rigging” narrative.

In response to the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene — damage that hit rural, Republican areas harder — the states of North Carolina and Florida have tried to similarly make it easier to cast ballots. There has been no obvious Republican outcry.

The right has also grown much more comfortable with social media executives weighing in on politics — one in particular.

In 2020, a contribution made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s private foundation to an organization that planned to provide grants to elections officials was cast as a devious effort to turn out more Democrats. Zuckerberg was broadly pilloried on the right despite the lack of evidence that the donations aided Democrats or even were meant to aid Democrats. Yet there’s no outcry for X owner Elon Musk’s explicit effort to use his platform (known four years ago as Twitter) on Trump’s behalf.

Musk has received only praise from Trump allies for explicitly endorsing the former president and for his support of a political action committee, America PAC, that aims to turn out Republican voters by paying people to help identify targets. Musk’s activity on behalf of Trump goes far, far further than anything Zuckerberg did, including massive (quiet) funding of right-wing efforts in 2022 and (loud) pledges to do more in 2024. X took over the platform’s handle @America and handed it to the PAC to explicitly promote Trump’s candidacy.

Nor did Republicans express outrage at Musk shutting down the account of reporter Ken Klippenstein. Klippenstein obtained and published a report that was allegedly part of the vetting process for Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). Soon after, his account on X was shut down for sharing private information — “doxing” Vance, in the vernacular.

The information was allegedly stolen from a Trump aide by hackers in Iran. The reason that the story about Biden’s son Hunter was limited for several hours in October 2020 was concern that the information in the article was a function of Russian hacking, as information made public shortly before the 2016 election had been. The muffling of the Hunter Biden story (which, despite slanted polling, almost certainly had no effect on the election) became a central element of the right’s insistence that social media companies were censoring their politics. The response to Klippenstein’s ongoing ban has been silence.

Not only has the Trump campaign not criticized the ban, but the New York Times reported Friday that the campaign coordinated with Musk’s company to block its circulation.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter was in part a reflection of his sharing a widespread belief on the right, one that predated the 2020 election, that the company specifically and social media companies broadly were intentionally censoring conservative users. The companies argued that they were, instead, reducing abuse and misinformation, with some prominent conservative users affected.

That argument was clearly robust from the outset, but it has been bolstered by recent research demonstrating that right-wing users were more likely to share false claims on social media. If the social media company implements limits on sharing false claims, those users would be more likely to be affected — which, the research suggests, they were. Once Musk bought Twitter, those limits were largely abandoned, allowing false information to spread. Information that still often emanates from the right and that is still often offered in service to Trump’s political goals.

To use the parlance of the right, X has now been “rigged” in favor of Trump, just as voting in Georgia has been. If Trump wins next month’s election, Harris supporters will have a ready-made excuse for why that election was illegitimate. Except, of course, that Harris is very unlikely to be promoting the idea that it was. And except that there’s no evidence that such “rigging” would have much effect this year any more than it did four years ago.