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In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.
“I’m beginning to believe our election was massively hacked,” wrote former journalist and documented conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen on Threads, neatly pouring every flavor of suspicion into one overfilled bottle. “Think Elon Musk, StarLink, Peter Thiel, Bannon, Flynn and Putin. 20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own.”
Infowars’ Alex Jones claimed Democrats attempted pro-Harris fraud but simply failed.
Such post-election delusions aren’t particularly surprising—as political science professors Joe Uscinski and Joseph Parent have written, indelicately but accurately, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” and tend to resonate when groups are “suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.” But what’s far stranger is that conspiracy theories about election tampering are somehow, still, also happening among the winners on the right.
On the left, Harris voters attempting to make sense of their loss have turned to baseless fears that Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk somehow tampered with the vote through Starlink. While that satellite internet company is wholly owned by his company SpaceX, it is not, contrary to many of these claims, used by any state to tabulate votes. There’s also the separate claim that 20 million votes are “missing” when compared to the last presidential election. That also isn’t true: results are still being tabulated, and the overall number of votes is on track to be extremely close to 2020’s total. On a........