It took a few days for people who have spent the past two years questioning the integrity of elections to find their voice.
Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for Arizona secretary of state, who has promoted conspiracy theories about 2020 election results, first sounded an optimistic note about this year’s vote count on Wednesday, telling supporters: “We will win when it’s all counted up.”
But by Saturday, after his Democratic rival had built a lead of more than 100,000 votes, Mr. Finchem took a different position. “They are screwing with the election counts,” he wrote on Twitter.
Claims of election fraud have not been as prominent after this election as they were in 2020. But as chances dimmed for some Republican candidates in tight races, many false and misleading narratives started to gain steam, pushed by Republican candidates like Mr. Finchem and Kari Lake, who ran for governor in Arizona, and far-right influencers. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on Thursday that if the Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada lost his race — the eventual outcome — then “it’s a lie.”
The conversation resurrected conspiracy theories popularized but never proved over the past two years, focusing on dubious claims that Democrats injected fake ballots into the system or that minor voting malfunctions on Election Day amounted to widespread fraud. The ideas circulated widely on far-right social media and in videos hosted by prominent election deniers including Mike...
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