Far from drying up, the flood of disinformation around the American mid-term elections is likely to swell as the wait for the final results of certain very tight duels continues.
It will probably take several days, or even weeks, to see some results. This delay could trigger a deluge of protests and unfounded accusations of electoral fraud, observers fear.
Far-right Republican candidates, who like former President Donald Trump say the 2020 election was stolen from him, did not wait for the results. Some have denounced problems with voting machines, which many observers say is intended to discredit the results when they are published.
Indeed, when Americans woke up on Wednesday, some battles were still at stake.
But some candidates will then have lost, unexpectedly. “Activists will turn their attention to the strongest (fraud) rumors (…), seeking to amplify them and turn them into larger stories,” says the nonpartisan research group Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). , in a report.
At the heart of the attention: certain states in which the candidates are neck and neck, and which could tip the Senate to one side or the other, such as Georgia, Nevada or Arizona.
In the case of “close elections, especially if they involve party control of the US Senate, misinformation will worsen,” said Rick Hasen, professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law.
“It has become common now among Trump supporters to believe that election theft in the United States is common, despite all the reliable evidence to the contrary,” he warned.
Threats of violence
These differences could pave the way for long periods of uncertainty, as more than half of the Republican candidates in these midterm elections repeat the allegations of fraud launched by Donald Trump in 2020.
“If the candidates do not yield or decide to contest the election, this period will be prolonged, with every day” new allegations, predicted the EIP report.
Experts also warn that “observers”, supporters mobilized by Donald Trump to hunt for electoral fraud, could baselessly claim that legal brakes have prevented them from spotting such irregularities.
This could foster the possibility of a violent confrontation, while such calls by election conspiracy theorists are not unheard of.
The SITE intelligence group, which monitors online extremists, says ultra-nationalists have encouraged “armed and violent intervention” at vote-counting centers in Georgia.
“Flows” of misinformation
Disinformation tends “not only to continue, but also to change and worsen in the post-election environment,” according to the Center for American Progress, a think tank.
Those who challenge election results “can loudly launch baseless legal challenges. Partisan election officials may refuse to certify strong election results,” the think tank said in a report.
And Donald Trump “could declare his intention to be a candidate for the presidential election in 2024, (…) giving him, as well as his constant flow of disinformation, increased media attention”, it is still indicated.
Republican officials, including Donald Trump, had already begun casting doubts on the integrity of the midterm election on Tuesday after reports of technical problems with voting machines in Arizona.
” Here we go again? The people won’t stand it!!! “, denounced Donald Trump on his social network Truth.
Blake Masters, a Senate candidate in Arizona supported by the former president, also estimated on Twitter that it is “difficult to know if what we are seeing is incompetence or something worse”.
About 20% of polling places in Maricopa County, Arizona, encountered difficulties on Tuesday, local officials said, saying it would not affect voting.
It is there already that in 2020, the counting of the result had been very tight between Donald Trump and the winner Joe Biden, concentrating a large part of the accusations of electoral fraud.