Despite former President Donald Trump's dominant Iowa caucus victory, some supporters are spreading false claims of voter fraud because he lost a single county by a single vote.
Trump, who has leaned on conspiracy theories and a fabricated narrative alleging that the 2020 election was rigged against him, has supporters perpetuating similar claims. Some of his most fervent supporters are pushing electoral conspiracies on far-right online platforms even though Trump won 51 percent of the vote in Iowa, Wired reported.
“Haley by one vote in Johnson County screws my prediction of 99/99 to Trump. Audit!,” election denial influencer Seth Keshel posted on Truth Social.
Keshel’s followers baselessly claimed that individuals who voted for Nikki Haley had been “paid” to vote against Trump.
Users on The Donald, a pro-Trump message board that played a key role in organizing the January 6 riot, expressed dissatisfaction with Haley's assertion on Monday night that Iowa voters transformed the presidential election into a "two-person race," Wired reported.
“They rigged that county by a single vote just so she could say this,” one user wrote.
Others claimed that the one-vote loss was the work of the so-called deep state with a user writing: “To win by ONE vote is just too conspicuous. It looks like a ‘F**k You’ from the Deep State.”
Similar messaging also spread on X/Twitter, with far-right activist Laura Loomer perpetuating such claims.
“After it was reported that President Trump won every county in Iowa tonight, Democrat shenanigans ensued and now it’s being reported that Johnson County in Iowa, which is a Biden +40 county, flipped to Nikki Haley by ONE VOTE,” Loomer posted on X.
She went on to falsely claim that the vote was from a Democrat who showed up to switch their registration to Republican at the door to vote for Haley, adding that Iowa allows for same-day registration, “which is why Democrats told their supporters to register Republican to vote for Nikki Haley during the Caucus.”
Another account called Red Eagle Politics wrote “We need a recount in Johnson County RIGHT NOW!”
The former president’s supporters continue to embrace the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Nearly 70 percent of his Iowa caucus voters falsely believe that President Joe Biden was illegitimately elected, The Independent reported. When questioned about the legitimacy of Biden's election in 2020, over two-thirds of Iowa caucusgoers said they believed it wasn’t — including 69 percent of Iowa caucusgoers who supported Trump.
With the presidential election approaching, experts warn that disinformation will present an unparalleled threat to democracy in 2024, especially as a growing number of voters are falling victim to disinformation being pushed out by Trump and his allies.
There are really “no legal means” of punishing Trump for fueling conspiracies around the GOP primaries unless he attempts to directly interfere in the election outcomes, A.J. Bauer, a journalism professor at the University of Alabama who studies conservative media, told Salon.
The main impact of conspiracy theories surrounding electoral outcomes in the primaries will be felt following the general election — if Trump continues “priming” Republican voters not to trust electoral processes, it increases the likelihood of further unrest should Biden win reelection, Bauer said.
It also increases the likelihood that Republicans engage in voter fraud to counteract perceived efforts by their opponents as we saw in 2020, Bauer pointed out, referring to three people in Florida being charged with voter fraud in connection with the last election.
“More than three years after the 2020 election, there are still people who are convinced that there was voter fraud and there is a persistent mistrust of American election institutions because of perceptions that Donald Trump wasn't able to reclaim the White House state,” Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, told Salon. “Legislators haven't taken enough affirmative steps to try to address and prevent voter fraud, and a lot of that's going to be viewed through a partisan lens.”
What makes matters worse is that social media companies have rolled back efforts to rein in misinformation on their platforms, allowing users to propagate unfounded conspiracy theories.
While the rise of social media has democratized the dissemination and the collection of news, it has also created an opportunity for people who are not trained journalists to spread misinformation, Gillespie pointed out.
“We live in a media environment that is so fragmented that people can find anybody to say what they already believe,” she said. "And so people seek out information that actually tends to reinforce what they already believe… People can self-select into watching news that just tickles their fancy and only tells them what they want to hear.”
The challenge of combating misinformation has always suffered from a “flawed premise” — that there is an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes accurate information in the first place, Bauer explained. Facts and information always require interpretation and “meaning-making” in order to be understood and used in political decision-making.
“Often, misinformation is merely someone contextualizing information in a way that someone else disagrees with, or would contextualize differently,” Bauer said.
The challenge is in building a media system and political culture that enables the cultivation of widely shared meanings of politically relevant information and the news of the day, he added.
“Increasing dysfunction in our media system, along with the growth of a distinctly right-wing media sector (with no left counterpart), has inhibited our ability to build shared values for interpreting news and information, while amplifying right-wing narratives and interpretations,” Bauer said. “The problem isn’t the susceptibility of Trump voters, it’s structural. It isn’t a problem of truth, it’s fundamentally a political problem.”
While the false information persists, technological advancements have also allowed people to have access to media manipulation tools, allowing information to be shared more quickly. A World Economic Forum survey found that AI-generated misinformation and disinformation was the top global risk for the next two years, surpassing climate change and war, NBC News reported.
“So far in this primary there hasn't been a whole lot of rumor – even compared to 2016 or 2020, at least on X,” Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who studies election rumors, told Salon. “That might change in New Hampshire if there is a serious challenge to the narrative of Trump's dominance.”
But he cautioned against using the primary as an “indicator” of the level of election misinformation we will see in November.
“A close race will dramatically increase the prevalence of election rumor, particularly if Trump is at the top of the ticket, and the focus of these rumors, with their eye toward New Hampshire, the one state that could be close, are an indication of that,” Caulfield said.
Long-term, if right-wing politicians continue to deny election outcomes, we will get closer to a “constitutional crisis,” Bauer predicted. If the Republican Party continues to follow Trump’s “discrediting of elections and legitimation of dictatorship,” we’re at risk of seeing a “fundamental break” with our constitutional traditions. “‘Democracy’ as we’ve experienced it is at risk.”
No steps have been taken to address the challenges posed by misinformation on social media in the near term, he added.
“We are going into the 2024 election cycle completely unprepared to address the structural issues that are making our politics dysfunctional,” Bauer said. “We have been openly discussing these problems for eight years, to no avail. If anything is to be done, it won’t happen before November. Things will get worse before they get better, if they get better at all.”
