After the 2024 general election, most observers agreed that the process was free, fair, and secure. (While some left and right-wing conspiracy theories about the election spread in some segments of social media, none gained mainstream support). Because of this general consensus, there’s a belief that, as Arizona’s Secretary of State Andrian Fontes claimed, “I think the age of election denialism, for all intents and purposes, is dead.”
Unfortunately, election denialism may be here to stay. Recently, President Trump’s nominee for Attorney General refused to say Biden won the 2020 election during her confirmation hearing, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Ashley Moody, a documented election denier, to a vacant seat in the US Senate. President Trump himself also reiterated claims that he actually won the 2020 election during his post-inauguration speech to supporters, going on to insist that he would have won California in 2024 if not for “illegal” votes.
Most of the underlying factors driving election denialism are alive and well—the only one that wasn’t fulfilled in this election cycle was that the candidate and political faction spearheading claims of election fraud were victorious. However, eventually the partisan pendulum will likely swing as it has throughout most of American history, and when that time comes, election denialism is likely to experience a resurgence.
Election denial
According to Protect Democracy, the election denial movement is defined by three main strategies—deceiving the public with disinformation that diminishes public confidence in elections, disrupting election administration and voting processes, and denying the result of elections. In 2024, election deniers still executed the first and second strategies—and were setting the stage for step three before President Trump won.
In the months leading up to November 2024, election deniers cited a myriad of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. American Oversight tracked last year’s efforts to deny the election, which included voter registration challenges, election litigation, anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, partisan election administration, election certification, and other factors, across several states.
While social scientists have not yet produced much research on the foundations of election denial in the United States, Charles Stewart III conducted a study into the public-opinion roots of election denialism by analyzing data from multiple states’ primary elections in 2022. He found that conspiracism and high levels of racial resentment made Republicans more likely to believe election denials. According to the same study, for independents, the strongest factors connected to election denialism were Christian nationalism and racial resentment. While Democrats were less likely than both Republicans and Independents to be election deniers according to this 2022 data, election denialism among them was, once again, largely explained by feelings of racial resentment. (To measure racial resentment, Stewart uses three questions taken from a scale recently developed by political scientists DeSante and Smith.)
In 2024, election deniers cited a myriad of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories in the months prior to the election. American Oversight tracked last year’s efforts to deny the election, which focused on voter registration challenges, election litigation, anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, partisan election administration, election certification, and so on, across several states.
There is robust research on what motivates allegations and perceptions of election fraud, whether or not it includes full-fledged election denial. As you might expect, there is also evidence that a person’s perception of election integrity is motivated by whether or not the candidate they supported won or lost. However, other research has found that partisanship plays a more minor role in an individual’s belief in voter fraud, while psychological factors such as conspiratorial thinking, populist attitudes, and poor cognitive reflection increased people’s belief in election fraud.
Election denialism at work in North Carolina
Most of the claimed evidence of a stolen election cited by election deniers was abruptly abandoned once Donald Trump was announced the winner of the presidential election. But these allegations still flourish in some state and local elections around the country. Ongoing in North Carolina is a legal battle over a state supreme court race. Following the initial count and two recounts, Democratic candidate Allison Riggs currently leads by 734 votes over Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin out of a total of a little over 5,540,000 votes cast.
There are currently four legal cases—Griffin v. North Carolina Board of Elections, Griffin v. North Carolina Board of Elections II, Kivett v. North Carolina Board of Elections, North Carolina Democratic Party v. North Carolina State Board of Elections—that involve this race (though in the Kivett case applies to all statewide races).
So far, the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked the state from certifying the result. Griffin has continuously fought the result of the race, filing two lawsuits—one directly to the state supreme court and one in a state trial court—to disqualify up to 60,000 mail ballots. However, the Democratic National Convention is appealing an earlier federal court decision to throw the case back to the state, an appeal the federal Fourth Circuit Court will hear in late January. In late January, the North Carolina Supreme Court dismissed a request by Griffin to rule on whether the challenged ballots should be disqualified and ordered that the case should first be decided by a lower court—though some justices left the door open to throwing votes away.
Griffin’s legal argument is that the ballots should be disqualified because those voters registered using forms that didn’t explicitly require applicants to provide their driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers to prove their identities. It should be noted that these forms have been accepted as valid in the past. Griffin asks for these voters to be individually contacted to provide this information and disqualify the ballots of voters who do not provide it, or do not respond. As mail ballots heavily favor Riggs, this could throw the race to Griffin—in effect, nullifying valid votes and subverting the will of the people. Legal experts at the American Civil Liberties Union say that this case poses the threat of “democratic backsliding.”
In his lawsuit, Griffin doesn’t include over 159,000 voters with the same registration issues who registered before 2004 and instead focuses on those who voted via absentee and early ballots. According to the Voting Rights Lab, this means that voters who are “older, whiter, and more likely to be Republican,” are more likely to be excluded from his petition, while those who are “younger and disproportionately Black” are targeted. Young voters are 3.4 times more likely than people over 65 to have their ballots challenged. Voters ages 18-25 accounted for 12,660 of the 60,273 ballots being challenged by Griffin.
If you voted by mail in North Carolina, you should go to the State Board of Elections website here, select the links to your county, and search for your name in the protest filing spreadsheet. Depending on the legal outcome, if you are listed you may be contacted by local election officials to provide proof of your identity for your ballot to be counted. Moreover, if your ballot is among those being challenged, you should have already received a notice in the mail. If you have questions about your ballot, contact your county board of elections.
The risks are real
Election denialism isn’t gone–just dormant until it becomes politically expedient, as we’re seeing in North Carolina. Democracy Docket argues that claims like Griffin and the RNC’s in the North Carolina state supreme court contest are setting the stage “for future election challenges.”
Disinformation alone is likely to become harder and harder to control and to detect as social media platforms walk back fact-checking, and federal officials carrying out Project 2025 could penalize social media companies that restrict or limit content on “core political viewpoints.” More and more people get their information from social media, and technological advances make generating misleading content easier.
Moreover, we need to remain vigilant and monitor attempts by election deniers in office to change election processes and influence election administration to sway future elections. In December, I wrote about an attempt to influence election administration in North Carolina. According to data from electiondeniers.org, a project run by States United Democracy Center, there will be election deniers serving in 2025 as governors in ten states (Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia) and secretaries of state in four states (Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, and Wyoming)—three of whom won office in 2024. In this Congress, there are 138 representatives and 20 senators serving who are 2020 election deniers. Depending on how far President Trump goes in implementing Project 2025, we could also see drastic negative changes to federal support for election administration and voting-rights enforcement. I’ve also written about how President Trump’s nominees to the Department of Justice could pose a danger to elections and voting rights.
One of the ways to possibly combat election denialism is to stymie election disinformation and boost the public’s confidence in the electoral process through greater election data transparency. We’ve created a series of science-backed recommendations to increase election data transparency. People deserve to know how their elections are run, be able to hold election officials accountable, and see the full results of their elections. And it’s imperative that state and local offices take responsibility for contacting voters to help cure potential ballot problems—not just throw out votes. Publicly accessible and transparent election data is critical to improving our elections and increasing public trust in elections.