Donald Trump demanded that Americans “overwhelming victory”. He called on his voters to prevail beyond the “margin of fraud” – Strange concept that attributes to the Democratic Party the ability to manipulate elections if the results are close. The American platform was granted to him: he did not need the recount to be completed in all the states to proclaim his victory, claiming to have obtained more voters and, for the first time, to have won the popular vote.
Videos of torn ballots, immigrants taken on buses to vote illegally or even “evidence” that dead people had voted… Disinformation professionals expected a wave of accusations from Donald Trump’s supporters after a close election or losses.
The Trumpist camp suddenly stopped referring to him during the night of Tuesday, November 5 to Wednesday, November 6 (French time). Like billionaire and influential supporter Elon Musk, who published, in “Game, set and match” triumphant with the announcement of the results in North Carolina, the first of the six key states to turn red. “When you win, it’s always easier. This refers to what Donald Trump already said in 2016recalls Julien Giry, a political science researcher at the University of Tours and a specialist in American conspiracism. “If I win, it’s normal; if I lose, it’s the fault of fraud.” »
Trump has challenged polls since 2012
This complete victory puts an end to Donald Trump’s endless cheating accusations. These are much older than we remember. Already in June 2012, he requested “end electoral fraud”targeting the Democratic Party. Convinced that Mitt Romney was leading the popular vote against Barack Obama, he described the election as “masquerade” and called – now – to “March on Washington”.
Same winner, in 2016, he tweeted. “which in addition to having widely won the electoral college”had according to him “he won the popular vote if the millions of people who voted illegally are deducted”. He will never give up and will make electoral fraud the central issue of the 2020 election and its consequences, in the name of “Stop the theft”, until the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Despite his accusation of “fraudulent conspiracy against the United States”, justified among other things by the spread of false information about the 2020 elections, the tribune never abandoned this conspiratorial speech. Starting in the summer, he began to warn against an alleged Democratic deception. Until midnight on November 5-6, he shared numerous appeals to his voters on “stay online”vote despite the lines, and report the slightest problem on one of their partisan sites, Protect the Vote. A movement followed by his followers. On Telegram, far-right groups have been mobilizing for weeks to “monitor the vote”.
But this time conspiratorial rhetoric was not used to deny the results. “In 2020 he came after the fact, at least in the last moments of the campaign, there he campaigned on behalf of the American people, observes Julien Giry. This has been a central issue that allows us to unite against corrupt elites and mobilize our electoral base, and mobilize them around them. »
An avalanche of false information since October
An endless number of suspicious micro-stories have invaded Trumpist social networks since mid-October, when early voting had already begun.
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In total, the American verification site Lead Stories has revealed since October 30 more than sixty false information related to the US elections, the vast majority of which refer to alleged electoral fraud. Among them, the rumor of a discreet vote to help Kamala Harris win in Kentucky; a video of a first-time voter, filmed from behind taking a selfie while casting his first vote, presented as a “mule” responsible for stuffing ballot boxes with fake votes; or a fake video accusing Democrats of having manipulated prisoner votes in three key states.
Each time, a minor anomaly came to light. An example, among many others: on October 31, the first day of early voting in Kentucky, a Trump voter filmed herself trying to vote, in vain, for the Republican candidate: the touch screen seemed to not want to accept her choice. Trumpist influencers like Nick Sortor are taking advantage of it to claim that voting machines, which are already the target of conspiracy theories in 2020, “not allowing voters to vote for Trump”. His video has been viewed more than two million times. In reality, said voter was tapping the wrong place on the screen, but their vote was ultimately counted correctly.
Russian interference in the final stretch
At the origin of this rich production, the Stakhanovite rhythm of the pro-Trump conspiratorial influencers, who rush to transmit the suspicious speech of the Republican candidate. “It is related to the breakup of the QAnon movement, analyzes Dusan Bozalka, a doctoral student in information sciences at Paris-II, at the Institute for Strategic Research of the Military School and at George Washington University. q [le compte anonyme qui nourrit la mythologie de QAnon] Having stopped posting messages in 2020, he was replaced by Republican influencers who made careers out of conspiracy. It is a way of life for them, because it generates traffic and, therefore, remuneration in X.”
The MAGA movement (acronym for Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”“make America great again”) was also able to count on the help of Russian influence groups. On at least three occasions in the last two weeks, the US intelligence services have reported electoral interference aimed at sowing doubts about the honesty of the vote, in the form of home videos spread on social networks. In one of them, a black man reviews pseudo-ballots and tears up the ones in Donald Trump’s name. In another, two black men pose as Haitian immigrants preparing to vote for Kamala Harris at several different polling stations.
The state administrations of Pennsylvania and Georgia have formally challenged its authenticity. These deepfakes have been attributed to Storm-1516, a Kremlin-linked disinformation group that previously operated in France during the Paris Olympics. The Internet user behind the account @AlphaFox78, a Trump activist who first spread the video of fake Haitian voters, explained to the CNN news channel that a pro-Kremlin propagandist had paid him $100 to post it.
Did this misinformation have any impact? “It is difficult to measure, admits Julien Giry, who recalls the importance of many other factors, in particular political and sociological.. We know that, in 2016, those who had been massively exposed to Trumpist conspiracy theories already belonged to a captive Republican audience, who would have voted for him no matter what. But it also serves to expand this electorate, to obtain marginal gains. » And obtain, as Donald Trump expected, a victory too big to ride“too big to be faked.”
