The 2024 Election Wasn’t Stolen

And neither was the 2020 election

A couple weeks before Election Day, I wrote about wild conspiracies that were spreading, including one about Democrats somehow altering the weather so that two hurricanes would target “Trump voters” in the south.

Of course, anyone who has any bit of understanding of science knows there’s literally no way for the government to create hurricanes. 

For years, tens of millions of people derided election conspiracies about the 2020 election, and how it was not, in fact, stolen. But something shifted on Election Day 2024. Conspiracy theories started spreading on the left, which some have now dubbed BlueAnon. 

Unlike what took place in 2020, these conspiracies were not being spread by elected officials or Kamala Harris. But they did get tens of millions of views.

Conspiracy 1: Elon Musk used his Starlink satellite system to steal votes from Kamala Harris.

This conspiracy was spread widely by someone using the name Etheria77 on TikTok. 

The person said, “California and other swing states were able to use Starlink in order to tally up and to count voting ballots in their state. The numbers don’t make sense, and the reason I’m going to tell you that is, you had guaranteed states that were going to turn blue and didn’t. Then you had millions of [votes] that are missing. This right here is bulls__t.” 

The video was quickly passed around and while it was eventually taken down on TikTok, it still continued to spread on Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms where millions of people saw it.

Some people even said Harris was using secret language to refer to the Starlink conspiracy in her concession speech, when she said, “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” (Newsflash: she wasn’t.)

There are legitimate criticisms to discuss about Musk’s involvement in the 2024 election, including his potentially illegal plan to pay people to sign a pledge and to give away $1 million per day in the days leading up to the election.

But Starlink throwing the election for Trump? That’s a big nope. Voting machines are not hooked up to the internet during elections. They weren’t in 2020, and they weren’t in 2024. Starlink satellites are not used to tally votes. 

Conspiracy 2: Harris’ campaign was secretly preparing for a recount all along.

This got started when people saw something called “President’s Recount Account” on one of Harris’s fundraising committees' websites. People thought that meant there was an official presidential recount in the works. (Again, this is not how this works… candidates don’t just “have a recount.” There is no such thing as a national election in the United States – all of the elections are run by states, who each have legally established criteria for when votes must or may be recounted.) 

One TikTok user said “Kamala Harris left us a breadcrumb. Just because we aren’t storming any capitols, those of us who actually understand how elections work understand that the numbers aren’t numbering.”

Hashtags like #Trumpcheated and “#DoNotConcedeKamala” and “#Recount2024” started circulating. 

Of course there was no recount. Kamala Harris conceded the election less than 24 hours after polls closed, and Donald Trump won both the electoral college vote and the popular vote. But the Democrats have done fundraising for down-ballot recounts. 

There’s currently one underway right now in Pennsylvania where Sen. Bob Casey has refused to concede to his Republican challenger. The vote was so close it triggered a state mandated recount, and both sides are in court arguing over which ballots should be legally counted.

A Democratic National Committee spokesperson said all money from the fundraising group, Harris Victory Fund (which had the “Recount Account” listed on its website), will be given to the DNC.

Conspiracy 3: As many as 20 million votes are “missing”

Interestingly, vote totals were used by both the left and the right in different conspiracy theories in 2024.

The claims involve the early vote totals that came in on Election Day, where numbers showed between 15 to 20 million fewer votes this time around compared to 2020. 

The right said that’s proof the 2020 election was “stolen” and that Biden must have gotten millions of illegal votes four years ago.

The left said that vote totals in 2024 prove votes are “missing” or “disappeared” and must be found and counted.

You might have seen this bar graph that appears to show a significantly smaller number of votes for this election. It’s bogus. 

But when these conspiracy theories started, millions of votes had yet to be counted. Before the election, I explained that vote counting laws varied by state, and some states didn’t even start opening mail in envelopes until Election Day. That means it takes days to count all of them.

Additionally, this graph is intentionally misleading. Note how the bottom number is not zero, it’s 50 million votes. The yellow line bisecting the middle of the graph represents 16 million voters above it and 65 million voters below it. 

Now, two weeks later, Kamala Harris’s vote total is 73.8 million and Donald Trump is at 76.5 million. Four years ago, Biden got 81.2 million and Trump got 74.2 million votes. So overall, both parties received fewer votes in 2024 than they did in 2020.

During the 2020 election, many people were off of work, and many states made it easier to vote because of the pandemic. Some states even had drive through voting. After the 2020 election, laws were changed to make it more difficult to vote again. People are back at their normal schedules. This demonstrates how making it easier to vote is a contributor to voter turnout.

But that aside, many people felt a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate this year. One reason I heard frequently was that they couldn’t vote for someone like Trump, but neither did their values align with Harris. Overall, voter turnout was down this year, with around five million fewer voters than four years ago. 

This isn’t conspiratorial – it’s politics. Voters didn’t turn out for Harris like they did for Biden.

Some of this started before Election Day

In the run up to the election, the assassination attempt on Trump led to people saying the whole thing was “staged” or that the Secret Service coordinated the attempted shooting with the Trump campaign to boost his image.

Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman sent an email after the assassination attempt, saying “NOT ONE NEWSPAPER OR OPINION LEADER IN AMERICA IS WILLING TO OPENLY CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY THAT TRUMP AND PUTIN STAGED THIS ON PURPOSE. Ask the question, people.”

He later parted ways with Hoffman, and apologized for his email, but a survey in July said more than one third of Biden supporters believed the shooting might have been staged.

Flip-flopping on election fraud

Of course there are also people who spent a lot of time setting the stage for a post-Election Day battle, who are now suddenly fine with how everything turned out. 

Congressman Jim Jordan, who pushed election conspiracies in 2020 including in the lead up to January 6, says that this time around, he didn’t see any issues.

He went on CNN and was asked if he thought this election was “free and fair?” He responded, “I do.”

Elections in the United States are not free and fair because your preferred candidate wins. Full stop. 

And 2024 demonstrates that 2020 was not stolen. If the Democrats had devised a secret plan to steal the election from Donald Trump in 2020, why, pray tell, did they not do it again? Why would they not employ the same methods to sweep the House and the Senate too? Why would they let the Republicans gain a trifecta and hold a majority on the Supreme Court?

What’s the truth?

Yes, this election was different from past elections. And guess what? That’s how it always is. Elections change every cycle based on a variety of external and internal factors.

In 2020, many states made it a lot easier to vote, because of the covid pandemic. Early and mail in voting was extended, which meant people had more options and time to vote. Since then, some states have expanded voting rights, but others have limited them. 

Kamala Harris did not appeal to voters in the same way Donald Trump did this time around. Democrats will spend months, if not years, dissecting why. The answers are still being uncovered, but they are not a conspiracy.