Republicans reprise unfounded claims of widespread election interference

As voters went to the polls, prominent conservatives latched onto glitches and other problems at polling stations to claim — without presenting evidence — that the results were being rigged.

Election machines briefly went down in Cumberland County, New Jersey, a state where the governor’s race is seen as a bellwether of President Donald Trump’s second term. The problem was quickly resolved and voting resumed, according to an election commission official reached by telephone. A series of bomb threats in the state — a reprise of threats in several states in last year’s presidential election — also turned out to be a hoax.

In Pennsylvania, independent voters were left off the voter rolls for state judicial and municipal races in Chester County, a swing district with a recent history of election disinformation. The county announced that it had replaced the voter rolls, and voting hours were extended as local officials vowed that all ballots submitted by those who chose to cast them in person would be counted.

The problems were enough for Jack Posobiec, the conservative podcaster, to make a sweeping claim of intentional interference across multiple states.

“We are seeing a coordinated attack to suppress Election Day voting,” he wrote on the social platform X. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The reflex to declare interference shows how much the conduct of elections continues to animate Republican politics — at least in races where the party’s candidates could be headed to defeat.

Before the polls even opened Tuesday, Trump called a vote in California to redraw congressional districts before next year’s midterm elections, as Texas and other Republican-controlled states have done, “a GIANT SCAM.”

“The entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump declared without citing anything to support the claim. He suggested that Republicans were somehow “shut out” of mail-in voting, warning that a “serious legal and criminal review” was on the way. Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, but it was not clear what he meant by a review.

There is little evidence that significant voter fraud is, or has been, a problem in California. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, lists only a single case in 2024 in its “election fraud map” and only 69 cases since 1982.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the state’s practice of allowing everyone to vote by mail was “ripe for fraud.”

Asked at the White House for evidence, she cited, “fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in in the names of other people and the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections.” A White House official, when asked by email for examples, repeated many of the claims about potential, though not real, fraud, and cited a Department of Justice lawsuit against the state saying it reported finding more than 2 million duplicate registrations, while seven counties did not report duplicates. The lawsuit does not claim any of the duplicates resulted in duplicate votes.

Leavitt said preparations for an executive order on elections were underway but did not detail what review Trump referred to. The Justice Department sent election observers to five counties in California, but by midday there were no immediate reports of problems with voting. Polls have suggested that the redistricting measure, called Proposition 50, is likely to pass.

New York’s mayoral race also spurred unfounded complaints of rigging, amplified by Elon Musk, who owns X and is the world’s richest man.

He criticized the layout of the ballots, complaining that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, was listed on the ballot twice, while former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom he had endorsed, was listed only once. His post prompted a flurry of reactions that the design was a deliberate attempt to boost his campaign, as well as rebukes of Musk’s claim.

In fact, Mamdani appears as a candidate for two parties, the Democrats and the Working Families Party. His Republican rival, Curtis Sliwa, also appears twice: as the candidate for the Republicans and the Protect Animals independent bloc. Cuomo, running as an independent, appears in the slots reserved for those without party affiliation, in the order in which they filed their candidacy.

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy organization that fights disinformation online, said that reactions like Musk’s continued to fuel voter skepticism about the democratic process at a time when social media platforms, led by Musk’s, have abandoned policies that restricted content trying to undermine elections.

“It’s worth noting that many on Twitter are trying to explain the rules to Musk,” she said, referring to X by the name it went by before Musk changed it, “but that of course gets lost in the chaos.”

Musk could not immediately be reached for comment.