In the weeks since the results of the 2020 presidential election indicated that Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States, it’s become clear that anyone who was hoping that political hostilities among Americans would die down after election week will be sorely disappointed.
As he did when the majority of the votes were still being counted, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that his electoral loss was the result of widespread voter fraud.
And as his most recent tweets show, the fact that legal challenges based on these claims have repeatedly failed even when they weren’t outright withdrawn has apparently done little to discourage him from continuing to lodge these accusations.
And while the replies to the tweets bearing these accusations show that some still believe the president, they also show an increasing number of Americans who seem tired of hearing from him.
Among the most recent tweets is a blanket claim that Detroit is a hotbed for voter fraud and has been for years.
As you can see, Twitter has attached a disclaimer disputing the accuracy of this claim and that warning appears to match voter fraud statistics gathered and analyzed by Stanford University.
As they’ve found in a study of 4.5 million votes cast over the course of eight years, about 43 of these votes could be considered remotely questionable and even they weren’t necessarily the result of fraud.
As the study’s lead author, Andrew Hall, put it, “We’re talking about 0.0003 percent of all voters over an 8-year period.”
Another tweet saw him reference a report that 2,600 previously uncounted ballots in Floyd County, Georgia, had recently been unearthed during the state’s recount.
As we can see, Trump appears to assume that these votes were all cast for him, but The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that 865 of those ballots were votes for Biden, while 1,643 were votes for Trump.
As Georgia’s voting system manager, Gabriel Sterling, explained, this was the result of election officials apparently forgetting to upload votes from a ballot scanning machine’s memory card. He referred to it as “an amazing blunder” and called for the resignation of Floyd County’s elections director but it is considered an anomaly in Georgia’s recount thus far.
For that reason, Biden’s projected 14,000 vote lead there is likely to hold.
Trump also tweeted out a map released by *The New York Times* that shows the areas where Trump received more votes than he did in 2016.
In a tweet that has also been marked with a disclaimer disputing his claims, Trump appears to interpret this as proof that his record of votes cast for a sitting president suggests the Democratic Party rigged the election.
However, AP News reported that while this record stands, it is eclipsed by the record-breaking number of votes Biden received in his historic victory, which is now approaching 80 million votes.
Trump apparently fails to realize that just because he attracted more votes than usual, that doesn’t mean his opponent can’t win even more votes.
For his supporters, the final appearance of this tweet in particular served as an example of Twitter showing bias even in the face of factual information.
It’s worth noting that Twitter likely isn’t disputing the map itself but rather what President Trump is extrapolating from it.
After all, they specifically said the claim about election fraud is disputed and I have outlined the nature of that dispute above.
But for another user, Trump’s repeated claims brought to mind an incisive speech by Sacha Baron Cohen.
Indeed, the concerns that he lays out speak to why Twitter includes these disclaimers on tweets that share inaccurate information about the democratic process in the first place.
However, some users believe that this doesn’t constitute strong enough action on Twitter’s part and feel Trump should be removed from the platform entirely.
Trump’s electoral map tweet also seemed to attract multiple replies with this exact wording.
This prompted a variety of responses ranging from an assertion that Biden’s popular vote record shows this person doesn’t speak for as many Americans as they think they do and confusion over why this person would specifically move to Mexico.
As one user put it , “You want a wall to keep them out but you want to go there as a ‘refugee’. The irony is rich with this one.”
In response to another tweet making unfounded claims of voter fraud, one user expressed concern that Trump will try something drastic in the final days of his presidency.
As The Guardian reported , such concerns are not without basis in the wake of reports that President Trump has suggested pre-emptively nuking hurricanes in the past.
It’s worth noting that Trump has disputed ever saying this but National Security and Homeland Security officials speaking under condition of anonymity to Axios insist he did.
Others, however, were more confident that Trump’s repeated claims were falling on increasingly deaf ears.
Following yet another disputed claim of thousands of fraudulent votes that Trump does not provide evidence for, one user suggests that he might as well be ranting at random drive-through employees as this point.
For another user, the president’s sustained vitriol only makes them pine for the peaceful transfer of power between previous administrations.
Indeed, this letter from Former President George H.W. Bush has seen a resurgence of attention online not only since the election results but in the days following the 2016 presidential election.
Ultimately, it seems that the American political scene remains as divided as ever but now carries an undercurrent of concern over whether the will of the people will prevail.
