Election Denial Conspiracy Theories Are Exploding on X. This Time They’re Coming From the Left

It took just minutes for the conspiracy theories about the 2024 US presidential election to flood Elon Musk’s X platform after Donald Trump was announced as the winner in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

The number of posts casting doubt on the election results and calling for a recount exploded on Wednesday morning, according to data from research company PeakMetrics. At noon Eastern time, posts on centibillionaire Elon Musk’s X platform peaked at 94,000 posts per hour. Many of the posts received significant amplification on X, with numerous posts reviewed by WIRED receiving more than 1 million views.

“How can we have had record turnout and twenty million fewer votes cast nationally?” author John Pavlovitz wrote in a post viewed 5.3 million times.

Gordon Crovitz, the CEO of NewsGuard, told WIRED that the term “Trump cheated” was trending on X on Wednesday morning. “There are 92,100 mentions of ‘Trump cheated’ on X since midnight,” Crovitz said.

The exact details of the conspiracy theories are still being ironed out by those promoting them, but for the Harris supporters sharing them, her loss was reason enough to indulge in pushing baseless disinformation about the election being stolen. Meanwhile, the massive pro-Trump election denial movement that sprung up in the wake of the 2020 election remained virtually silent on Wednesday morning, in comparison to the flood of content it shared in the days and weeks leading up to the election.

“It doesn’t matter whether baseless allegations about voting irregularities come from the right or the left,” says Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project. “The impact on our system of these lies is the same: People will end up trusting the infrastructure of democracy less, setting us up for more disinformation and disengagement. These drop-offs in trust take decades to undo. Take a look at countries in Eastern Europe that have been attempting to rebuild trust in the system since the ‘90s. We should all be wary of these allegations, no matter their source.”

The posts calling for a recount used a variety of hashtags including #donotconcedekamala and phrases like “math ain’t mathing.” Many of them contained vague claims that “something is very off.” The one specific claim being made by many of these accounts suggests that there are 20 million “missing votes.”

While at publication time the Associated Press’ vote count was indeed 16 million votes lower than that for the 2020 election, the explanation is trivially simple: The entirety of the vote hasn’t been tabulated yet.

“Election denial is anti-democratic, whether it comes from the left or the right,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, wrote on X. “No, 20 million votes aren’t missing. Votes are still being counted in many states, including millions in CA alone. Number of votes in 2024 very close to 2020, when all are reported “

Posts relating to these conspiracy theories began to gain traction around 2 am Eastern, PeakMetrics data shows, which coincides roughly with the time the election was called for Trump—but even as Americans went to bed, the number of posts did not decline.

“By 8 am ET, the number of posts per hour had surged to 31,991,” PeakMetrics wrote in an analysis shared with WIRED. “There was perhaps a surprising lack of overnight drop-off in posts from 2 am to 7 am ET—when typically posts would decline as the US hits sleeping hours. The steady increase in posts on the Kamala recount/missing votes narrative throughout the overnight hours may simply reflect the intensity of this discussion—or may point to inauthentic or automated posting behavior.”

Unlike the election denial movement in 2020, which was inspired by Trump’s refusal to accept the results, these conspiracy theories haven’t received any support from the candidate. On Wednesday, Harris urged her supporters to accept the results and assured them her team “will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”

The phenomenon of left-leaning or anti-Trump accounts posting conspiracy theories on social media platforms, referred to as BlueAnon, came to prominence earlier this year in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life in July.

“Any event that seems improbable will always invite conspiracy theories about what ‘really’ happened,” says Mike Rothschild, an author who writes about conspiracy theories and extremists. “In this case, it’s a factually incorrect narrative that there are tens of millions of missing votes and that Russian bomb threats sabotaged the Harris campaign. Neither are true—turnout appears to be down, and many states, including California, are still well into counting. And while bomb threats are never acceptable, they’re not the reason why the Harris campaign lost every swing state. To write Trump’s win off to conspiracy theories is to not live in reality.”

While the leaders of the election denial movement miraculously did not find any voting-related conspiracies to share in the wake of Trump’s victory—unlike in 2020, when he lost—some of those figures could not help but indulge in some conspiratorial thinking.

Dinesh D’Souza, who published a debunked and recalled book about ballot mules rigging the 2020 election, capitalized on the missing votes narrative to prove his claims about the 2020 election were right all along.

“Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024,” D’Sousa wrote on X in a post viewed 3 million times. “Does anyone really believe Biden got 80 million in 2020? Where did those 20 million Democratic voters go? The truth is, they never existed. I think we can put the lie about Biden’s 80 million votes to rest once and for all.”

Right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson made similar claims in a post viewed more than 17 million times.

Meanwhile, in the Telegram channels and WhatsApp groups that were formed to push election conspiracy theories, many of the leaders of the groups were patting themselves on the back for foiling the theft of another election.

“I wonder if this is how a soldier feels when he returns home and people thank him for his service,” Douglas Frank, who left his job as an Ohio high school math teacher to become a minor celebrity in the election denial world, wrote on his Telegram channel. “It’s hard to take any credit; he just did his part, and he thinks of his friends that did not return home. And the war is far from over; I think we still have rough days ahead. See you in the battlefield.”