Election deniers are shifting their rhetoric from ‘stolen’ to ‘rigged’ elections. The distinction is important

False claims of “stolen election” have reverberated among the anti-voting right for years: Conspiracies alleging mass voter fraud, ballots flown in by foreign adversaries, voting machines programmed to flip Republican votes to Democrats. 

But prominent election deniers, far-right activists and some ordinary Republicans have recently shifted their rhetoric. 

“Elections are not stolen, but rather rigged – by the laws they have on the books in the various states, which allow for nearly unlimited ballot counting capacities,” Seth Keshel, a prominent anti-voting activist who played a central role in promoting President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” in 2020, recently wrote.

On the surface, it might seem like a minor shift in terminology. 

But the pivot matters. It reflects a broader effort by the anti-voting right to soften its conspiratorial ideas to appeal to a wider base, sow distrust in routine election procedures, and court support for the GOP’s harsh anti-voting policies. And it offers an unspoken acknowledgement that, over half a decade since the 2020 election, the quest to find actual evidence of fraud has utterly failed.

But it also reveals an unsettling reality: What many on the right hate about our elections isn’t just widespread fraud — which doesn’t exist. It’s that, at least in some states, voting rules — allowing everyone to vote by mail, for instance — make voting too easy, especially for marginalized groups. 

Why that’s a danger, rather than a civic good that allows for more voices to be heard, is rarely spelled out. But at the root of the fear is a belief that widespread voting is bad news for the right. 

It’s an outlook that has characterized the GOP for nearly half a century or more, though over the years they’ve gotten better at disguising it. 

“Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down,” the influential right-wing operative Paul Weyrich, who founded the Heritage Foundation, told a conservative conference back in 1980.

But it has resurfaced with a vengeance after many states expanded access to voting — especially mail voting — as a response to Covid in 2020. For some on the right, making voting easier was in itself an illegitimate attempt by Democrats to unfairly game elections.

In 2023, the prominent anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell lamented that it’s too easy for college students to vote, implying that Democrats were manipulating the rules to their own benefit.

“They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed,” she said.

The claims of “stolen elections” started in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when President Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat to Joe Biden. Trump and his legal team instead mounted an unprecedented effort to subvert the election results, lodging a variety of false claims and conspiracy theories to explain away the loss. 

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said in the immediate aftermath of that election. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”

It failed, but the conspiracies endured and became a frequent refrain among future GOP nominees for explaining subsequent election defeats in 2022 and 2024. 

But the tone started to shift this midterm season, particularly in the wake of California’s contentious primaries. 

Because of the widespread use of mail-in voting in California, and the state’s pro-voter rules for curing ballots, it can take days or weeks for close races to be called.

Election deniers and far-right figures were quick to cry fraud when no winners were immediately declared. False claims of a stolen election quickly centered on LA’s mayoral election, where Spencer Pratt — a Republican who ran a buzzy campaign that gained traction on social media — slipped to third place as mail ballots were slowly counted. 

“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had,” Trump wrote on social media. 

But as more votes rolled in and GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton clinched second place, the narrative shifted, and prominent Republicans shied away from claims of another stolen election. 

When House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R) was pressed by a reporter about claims of election fraud in the California races, he hedged and blamed the state’s pro-voting laws, which allow for greater access to the ballot box. 

“Look, whether you can prove fraud or not, it does undermine voter integrity in the vote,” Scalise said. “I think it’s raised a lot of skepticism among voters when they see these wide changes days and weeks after the election and you still can’t get a result two, three weeks after the election happened.” 

Weeks after California’s elections were called, LA GOP chair Roxanne Hoge went on a right-wing podcast to explain that it wasn’t fraud that caused Pratt to lose, but rather the state’s pro-voting laws — like automatic voter registration and absentee ballot access — that she claimed put Republicans at a disadvantage.  

“All those things are baked into a cake that the rest of the country would be like, ‘Oh my God, that’s fraud!’” she said. 

Other prominent anti-voting voices made similar comments, emphasizing that the way Democrats “rig” elections isn’t some nefarious illegal scheme, but rather the simple, democratic process of legislating to expand access to voting.

“This is how CA Democrat’s “STEAL” elections,” wrote one popular right-wing influencer who posts under the pseudonym Hunter Eagleman. “Same day automatic voter registration. (Easily manipulated by illegals to register to vote). “No excuse” mass mail-in ballots. Made “Ballot harvesting” legal allowing 3rd party interference. Democrat gerrymandered maps. Now a push for Illegals to vote in elections (LA City Council voted 10-5 to allow illegals to vote).” 

Another popular right-wing X account put it bluntly: “L.A. Election laws are designed to rig elections… California is the warning for America!”