U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Monday that last week’s congressional elections were not fair and that fraud involving voting machines took place. He offered no evidence for his suggestions.
“Does anyone really believe this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the polls have been so wrong???” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. He added that some batches of early votes were so large that “it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went out to vote.”
“It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter,” Trump concluded in the post.
The president offered no evidence for his theories. His post refers to a situation in which, in Texas, among other places, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico received so many votes cast before Election Day that he would have won even if every voter who cast a ballot on Tuesday had backed his opponent. In Texas and in many other states, most voters cast their ballots before Election Day, by mail or in person.
For about a decade, early voters have been more likely to support Democrats.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, pre-election polls pointed to a decisive Democratic win, although in some cases opposition candidates turned out to be somewhat underestimated. Democrats won a majority in both chambers of Congress, including at least 252 seats in the House of Representatives. Results so far show that 13% more voters cast ballots for Democratic candidates in House races than for Republicans. That is the largest advantage for either party since 1976.
It was the president’s first post-election statement in which he clearly made accusations of electoral fraud. Previously, he had spoken only of an unfair ploy by Democrats in Alaska, who he said had induced two candidates to run in order to confuse voters and take votes away from Sen. Dan Sullivan. Over the past weekend, Trump continued to share numerous posts from anonymous accounts featuring charts that were meant to point to alleged irregularities.
On election night itself, the president told The New York Times that he would accept the result of the vote.
Trump has repeatedly made unproven accusations of electoral fraud in the past, particularly regarding the 2020 election, which he lost. He and his associates claimed, among other things, that voting machine and vote-counting manufacturers took part in a conspiracy. In 2023, Fox News agreed to pay $787 million in damages to Dominion Voting Systems for spreading those theories. Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani also reached a settlement.
From Washington, Oskar Górzyński (PAP)
