JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In the early hours last Wednesday morning, the presidential election was called for Donald Trump. Then, once again, came the baseless claims of voter fraud. This time, it's coming from both the right and the left of the political spectrum, but there are some important differences in these narratives. NPR's Shannon Bond has been following them and joins us now. Hi, Shannon.
SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: Shannon, start, if you could, by walking us through these claims quickly.
BOND: Yeah. So the idea here is that there are millions of what people are calling missing Democratic votes. And this idea is based on comparing the 81 million votes President Joe Biden got back in 2020 with the vote count for Kamala Harris this year, which is still very much incomplete. But we're seeing figures on the right, who have for years been pushing the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, jumping on this perceived gap to say, look, we were right - 2020 was stolen. You know, how could Harris have gotten so many fewer votes than Biden?
Now, remember, Trump has inspired an election denial movement that has spent this last four years really building up a community and infrastructure to share what they say is evidence of cheating, and, you know, they were seizing on this idea. And then separately, this same narrative around these, quote-unquote, "missing votes" is also being used by some on the left to cast out on this year's result. But I will say that has had much less of an impact so far.
SUMMERS: Can you just explain what exactly is going on with the vote count?
BOND: Yeah. I mean, the simple answer is it's still underway, right? It takes time to count all the votes. Some states take longer. I'm in California. We're still counting. And so, even since these claims have emerged, you know, this gap between Harris and Biden has gotten smaller as more votes are counted. And also, Juana, there are, of course, shifts - right? - from election to election and how people vote. This year, all indications show Trump made gains throughout the country. So there were people who voted for Biden four years ago who didn't vote for Harris or didn't vote at all, and that's normal.
SUMMERS: Right. OK, so going back to these claims that the 2024 results somehow prove that there was voter fraud in 2020 - I'll just point out here this idea has been thoroughly debunked. Why is it still so potent for some people?
BOND: Well, I think it's partially Trump himself continues to proclaim this, right? And leading up to this year's election, he primed his supporters to believe he could only lose again if there was fraud. But when the results started coming in, largely election deniers fell silent. And then, when these claims about 2020 reemerged, they were being picked up by big right-wing influencers who really amplified them. Here's Kate Starbird of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, which has been tracking election rumors.
KATE STARBIRD: There are folks that are - make a living right now on talking about election fraud. 2024 isn't going to give them much material for that because it's not going to advance their political goals.
BOND: So she says, you know, for many of these folks, reviving these 2020 claims is a way of keeping this movement they've been building alive.
SUMMERS: Shannon, earlier you mentioned that people on the left are also pushing claims of election fraud. Tell us what those are about.
BOND: Yeah, so there have been claims that Trump cheated. There were some calls even for Harris not to concede. And some of these posts were, you know, citing the same issue of these supposed missing votes. And some of them, you know, got quite a bit of traction - millions of views on X and other social media sites. But Starbird and other researchers at the University of Washington, they say there's a key difference between these narratives and the pro-Trump Stop The Steal movement back in 2020. On the left, there is just not the same network of influencers who take these claims and supercharge them and share what they claim as evidence for them, like misleading photos or videos. And then, maybe most importantly, Juana, these concerns are not being validated by Kamala Harris or other Democratic leaders. You know, as we know, Harris conceded the election the next day, and that sets a really important tone for the people who might be looking at this.
SUMMERS: That is NPR's Shannon Bond. Thank you.
BOND: Thanks so much, Juana.
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