President Trump, his son and top members of his campaign on Wednesday advanced a set of unfounded conspiracy theories about the vote-tallying process to claim that Democrats were rigging the final count.
Eric Trump tweeted a video, first pushed out by an account associated with the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, that purported to show someone burning ballots cast for his father. The materials turned out to be
sample ballots, and Twitter quickly suspended the original account that circulated the misleading clip.
Trump’s son and others, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, claimed falsely in tweets later hidden by warning labels that the president had won Pennsylvania — even though no such determination had been made. And the campaign’s spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, claimed without evidence that crowd control at a processing center in Detroit was an effort to thwart Trump’s chances of reelection.
The misleading messages came as states continued to count mail-in ballots that appeared to
favor former vice president Joe Biden. The Trump campaign’s quest to sow doubt about the tabulation process went hand-in-hand with its pursuit of a
flurry of legal actions seeking to halt the counting and its tacit endorsement of protests from Philadelphia to Detroit aiming to “stop the steal.”
“They’ve shifted their tactics, after months-long attacks on voting by mail, to saying that the voting process and the vote-tallying process is rigged,” said Joan Donovan, director of the
Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “They are priming the public, and laying the groundwork for legal challenges to mail-in voting and to the voting processes.”
Social media companies
raced to apply labels to the misleading posts, with Facebook in most cases appending a notice that the count was still underway. Twitter applied more stringent standards, hiding some of the claims behind warning labels and restricting the reach of the tweets — but those actions often came only after the messaging had already been shared widely.