# Election Conspiracy Theories **Election conspiracy theories** are the family of false or unsubstantiated claims that American elections are systematically rigged — by voting machines, mail ballots, dead or noncitizen voters, foreign hackers, or corrupt officials — and that the results can therefore be disregarded. The genre is older than 2020 (the vault's [[Charles Tilly]] entry on contentious politics and the Reconstruction-era "fraud" pretexts on [[Voter Suppression]] show the lineage), but the [[The Big Lie]] — the claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from [[Donald Trump]] — gave it a party, a movement ([[Stop the Steal]]), a legal record and, from 2025, a government. This is the umbrella page for the *claims*; the strands have their own pages, and [[Election Denialism]] in the Disinformation subject covers the *psychology and media mechanics* of belief in them — the two are a designed split, not a duplicate. ## The strands - **The machines.** [[Dominion Voting Systems]] and [[Smartmatic]] were accused of flipping votes, with [[Hugo Chávez]] cast as the dead-Venezuelan origin ([[Release the Kraken]], [[Sidney Powell]]). The claims were false and expensive: the [[Fox-Dominion Settlement]] cost Fox $787.5M, the [[Smartmatic v Fox News Lawsuit]] followed, and Powell and others pleaded guilty in the [[Trump Georgia RICO Case]]. The [[Alex Jones Sandy Hook Judgments]] pages are the civil-liability precedent. - **The ballots.** Mail voting as fraud vector; "2000 Mules"-style ballot-harvesting claims (retracted by its publisher in 2024); noncitizen voting, which the [[Proof of Citizenship Requirement]] and [[SAVE Act]] pages show being converted from claim to law. - **The process.** The "stolen" certification: fake electors, the Eastman memos, January 6. The [[Authoritarianism and Democratic Backsliding Timeline]] carries the sequence; the [[QAnon Timeline]] the milieu that absorbed it. - **The foreign hand.** Italian satellites, Chinese thermostats, and — in the 2025 reframing — the claim that the *2016* election was the one manipulated, advanced by [[Tulsi Gabbard]] as Director of National Intelligence in the [[Twitter Files (2022-2023)]] and [[Dobbs Draft Opinion Leak]] vein of retroactive revision. The [[Epoch Times Indictment]] page shows the media economy that monetized all of it. ## From claim to policy What distinguishes the post-2020 genre from its predecessors is the legitimization pipeline. Claims that failed in more than sixty courts became the premise for state laws restricting mail voting and registration, for the March 2025 executive order on election "integrity," for the [[Election Assistance Commission]]'s hollowing, for the pardons of January 6 defendants, and for the [[Conspiracy Thinking]] the vault documents in the second administration's own statements about the 2026 midterms. The theory did not need to be proven; it needed to be *believed by the people writing the rules*, and by 2025 it was. ## See Also - [[The Big Lie]] · [[Stop the Steal]] · [[Conspiracy Thinking]] · [[QAnon Timeline]] · [[Authoritarianism and Democratic Backsliding Timeline]] - [[Dominion Voting Systems]] · [[Smartmatic]] · [[Sidney Powell]] · [[Release the Kraken]] · [[Fox-Dominion Settlement]] · [[Smartmatic v Fox News Lawsuit]] · [[Trump Georgia RICO Case]] - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Proof of Citizenship Requirement]] · [[SAVE Act]] · [[Election Assistance Commission]] · [[Tulsi Gabbard]] · [[Epoch Times Indictment]]