Super Tuesday was a blowout for former President Donald Trump, who won 14 of 15 states. Yet Trump’s most ardent supporters believe that all votes and elections are now irredeemably fraudulent, and they spend their days fanning wild conspiracies online, predicting what will happen in November and speculating about what their perceived enemies will be. How to plot to defeat Trump.
Voting rights groups reported few issues affecting Super Tuesday voters, but that didn’t stop members of the group that refused to vote. Instead, they seized on anything they could find that seemed to indicate a major election conspiracy. Allegations of fraud slowly emerged on Tuesday before exploding around 10:30 a.m., when users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads all discovered the platforms were offline.
Instead of waiting to find out the real cause – it turns out it’s a Technical issues fixed by Meta within 90 minutes— Members of anti-election groups and conspiracy channels on Telegram were quick to claim foul play.
“It’s Super Tuesday and nearly every major tech platform is down,” one election-denying influencer wrote on Telegram. “This is no coincidence… the definition of ‘rehearsal’ is to rehearse before the actual performance or program.” They then claim that the fact that X, Telegram and Truth Social are still online “proves” that these platforms “will likely be the only ones available on Election Day platform”.
The belief that the Meta outage was planned was widely shared on multiple platforms, including pro-Trump message boards like X and The Donald. “November practice run?” Rogan O’Handley, a far-right influencer with 1.4 million followers, wrote in a post on X that has received more than 300 views Thousands of times.
“They are practicing shutting down communications so you don’t report election fraud,” one user on The Donald wrote in the post.
Other influential figures spent the day reflecting on allegations of election fraud in 2020. David Clements is one of the most influential election deniers of 2020. On the Telegram channel he runs, the day began with the public release of a film he made about the stolen 2020 presidential election.
Over time, Clements shared Super Tuesday conspiracies, including an unsubstantiated claim that voters received an error message when trying to vote in Dallas.
The claim is based on an image first posted by a writer at conspiracy website Gateway Pundit. However, election integrity group Common Cause pointed out in X’s post This photo doesn’t actually show a voting machine, but a so-called “emergency drawer.”
“This is a locked, secure ballot container used to store and scan ballots, ensuring they are included in the tally at the polling station at the end of the day,” the organization explained.
But on Telegram, such explanations were not seen or ignored. “People continue to focus on and call out their corrupt behavior,” one supporter of Clements wrote.
Later in the day, news broke that Taylor Swift was urging her 282 million Instagram followers to “vote for the person in power who best represents you.” Unsurprisingly, this was met with ridicule from election-denying groups, as the pop star was once again accused of being part of a psychological campaign.