ICYMI: How Trump and His Allies Are Sowing Doubt Ahead of the Midterms

Washington Post: How Trump and his allies are sowing doubt ahead of the midterms

President Donald Trump and his allies have spent the final weeks before the midterms showering his supporters with a relentless stream of doubt about the legitimacy of the election, priming them to question results if Republicans lose.

In court, the administration is telegraphing its readiness to challenge results based on alleged fraud. In podcasts and social media posts that are delivered nonstop to Trump’s core backers, right-wing influencers are telling supporters to expect cheating.

Nearly 600 high-profile, right-wing social media accounts, podcasts and other online media have published more than 7,000 statements questioning the election’s integrity so far this year, a Washington Post analysis found. That messaging has, in particular, pushed overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud — themes that are twice as prevalent as they were during the 2024 election cycle, The Post’s analysis found.

Voting by noncitizens is rare, as is fraud involving mail ballots. Most cases involve small numbers of votes, not the large number that would be needed to change election outcomes. And those few perpetrators typically face criminal charges.

Voting by noncitizens is illegal and, despite Trump’s claims, it rarely happens.

After initially claiming as many as 16,000 noncitizens were on the voter rolls in Nevada, the administration sent a list of just 185 names to state officials, who quickly determined all 185 were citizens. Georgia’s secretary of state this year identified 432 possible noncitizens on its rolls over 30 years — a fraction of a percentage point in a pool of millions of voters.

Trump has questioned election results ever since 2016, when he won the presidency but lost the popular vote and alleged that more than 3 million people voted illegally. Four years later, his election denials led to a barrage of lawsuits, all unsuccessful, and a violent attack on the Capitol.

Read more from the Washington Post here.