After the 2020 election, WorldNetDaily went all in on promoting bogus narratives about election fraud — even as every single one of those bogus claims quickly crumbled. But WND hadn’t learned its lesson, so its writers spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign pre-emptively spreading similarly false claims about election fraud. On Nov. 5, the day of the election, WND published anonymously written articles on isolated incidents designed to further the narrative:
- Ballot-scanning ‘malfunction’ in key battleground state
- Misprinted ballots, broken machines in Southern state
But with Donald Trump’s election win, WND pretty much stopped talking about election fraud. Why? Because its writers knew that, just like in 2020, election fraud was never real — it was used to establish a pretense for Trump to challenge the election if he lost. As before, WND was simply lying to its readers for political reasons.
A couple of WND writers did try to explain away the flip-flop, though. Michael Master wrote in a Nov. 11 column:
In 2020, about 158 million people voted, which was about 10 to 15 million more voters than in any previous presidential elections – 10 to 15 million more.
In 2024, the Republican Party had 500 lawyers, 100,000 poll workers and 90-plus legal cases to spot and stop election fraud such as illegal drop boxes, ballot harvesting, multiple voting addresses, late ballot submissions, machine malfunctions, etc. Therefore, the poll workers, Supreme Court and state courts stopped many of the election irregularities of 2020 for the 2024 election.
In 2024, about 146 million voted, which was about 12 million fewer than in 2020. This year was in line with prior elections other than 2020. RNC co-chairs Michael Whately and Lara Trump did a great job of stopping Democrat election fraud in 2024 – and Democrats lost the presidential, Senate and House elections without it.
Did election fraud/irregularities get Biden elected in 2020? Did election fraud/irregularities cause the huge spike in voters in 2020? These statistics are more evidence (smoke) that election fraud/irregularities likely got Joe Biden elected in 2020.
Proof? Not exactly. Smoke? Yes. And where there is smoke, there is fire.
As Master well knows, there was never a fire, and that “smoke” was manufactured by right-wing conspiracy theorists — he’s just repeating the maxim of repeating a lie until it becomes true (which it never did). Master also failed to identify a single instance of “Democrat election fraud” that the army of Republican activists supposedly stopped.
Rachel Alexander — who spent the past four years spreading bogus right-wing conspiracy theories about election fraud and even plotted a lawfare and harassment campaign against election officials to intimidate them into tipping the election toward Republicans — used her Nov. 11 column to insist that Republican “observers” stopped purported election fraud:
Conservatives heaved a sigh of relief when Donald Trump was announced the winner of the presidential election, since most believed the left was going to cheat and steal the election again from him. While there was almost certainly cheating in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona between Kari Lake and no-name, open-borders Ruben Gallego, as well as with Arizona’s abortion-till-birth Prop. 139, Trump was allowed to win the state and the six other battleground states.
The common wisdom developing is the massive increase in observers watching this election compared to the 2020 and 2022 elections made the difference. Combined with the huge GOTV effort led by Turning Point USA and the GOP, the left was under far more scrutiny and risked being caught due to how much vote padding they would need in order to catch Trump.
Additionally, the courts began revealing that they were less likely to rubber stamp the fraud. One of the biggest dominoes was the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruling earlier this year that attorneys cannot be disciplined for bringing election challenges. As a direct result of that, the State Bar of Arizona’s disciplinary judge dismissed disciplinary proceedings against two of Lake’s attorneys, citing the fact she would be reversed by the court otherwise.
Alexander did keep up the unsupported narrative that any election result favorable to liberals was somehow rigged (though she hasn’t bothered to examine any election in which a Republican won) while also repeating a old bogus claim about the 2022 Arizona governor’s race that her favorite candidate, Kari Lake, lost handily:
Similarly, Arizona’s abortion-till-birth Prop. 139 passed with a huge 63% supposedly voting yes. This was strange considering Republicans and their ballot measures swept most of the state, including the far reaching Secure the Border Prop. 314, passing with 61% support. The reason Democrats thought they could get away with cheating on Prop. 139 is because of the spin they’ve used about abortion in recent years – they claim that adverse abortion laws and court decisions drive moderate and independent women out to vote for abortion who wouldn’t otherwise vote.
I’ve never seen any real evidence proving this; in fact, the evidence goes the other way. Rasmussen Reports conducted an exit poll after the 2022 election in Arizona, which Lake allegedly lost, and found that she really won by 8 points over Democrat Katie Hobbs for governor. Considering this was a few months after Roe v. Wade was reversed, this is evidence women weren’t driven to go vote for abortion.
Since there was massive fraud involved getting Prop. 139 on the ballot, it’s not much of a stretch that supporters would commit fraud during the election.
In fact, that ridiculous “exit poll” was taken months after the election by shady and partisan pollster Rasmussen. Unsurprisingly, Alexander identified no examples of “cheating” during the Prop. 139 election, nor did she mention that similar ballot initiatives passed in six other states — undercutting her narrative of the vote being “strange.” And her evidence of “massive fraud” was an opinion piece she wrote for a right-wing website touting an anti-abortion group’s allegations of voters purportedly being misled on the petition drive to place the initiative on the ballot; she censored the fact that the challenge was rejected by the courts.
Still, Alexander was desperate to keep the fraud narrative alive despite a lack of actual evidence (and her refusal to seek out Republican election fraud), so she closed her column with a flourish:
Some believe there were a few other races around the country affected by fraud. They include down-ballot races in North Carolina with associated shenanigans, down-ballot races in Michigan, and three other Senate races in battleground states Trump won. While the entire country shifted a few points to the right, the battleground states unrealistically only shifted about 1 to 3 points to the right.
The blue states have been accused of election fraud going back years, but since it’s been completely mastered in those states, they no longer get much scrutiny.
The concern now is that Democrats will pull some last-minute shenanigans to prevent Trump from taking office. The main method I’m hearing is they are still trying to secure wins in a few congressional races in order to gain control of the House of Representatives. If successful, they could invoke the Constitution’s insurrection clause against Trump.
Of course. Narrative comes before facts, after all.