Opinion: Voting disinformation is here to stay, but our election system worked flawlessly
The good news coming out of Tuesday's election is clear: No matter which presidential candidate you supported, our free and fair system of collecting and counting mail and polling place ballots worked as designed.
As Wednesday dawned we knew who had won and could be confident in the results, even if the winner just spent more than a year lying about how elections are run in this country.
The bad news here is also perfectly clear: The "Fraud Industrial Complex" that has grown up and prospered around President-elect Donald Trump's ceaseless stream of election disinformation is here to stay. There's money to be made in those lies. So you'll hear more of them.
The unknown going forward is this: Republicans have long embraced the state-centric system of running elections. But they also just spent the year suggesting ways to federalize elections, based on the false claim that noncitizens vote in ways that tip federal elections – they don't – and pushing for voter identification requirements that potentially disenfranchise eligible voters.
The 'resilience' of American voting system was on full display
The good news rang out Wednesday morning when 11 political science and law professors gathered virtually to talk with journalists about what happened in the past 24 hours.
Charles Stewart, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said people trust elections most when they have a good experience while voting and the candidate they support wins.
"I used to quip that the easiest way to increase trust in elections is for Donald Trump to win the presidency," Stewart said. "And I think we're going to test that proposition in the next couple of months, and whether that, in fact, takes some of the air out of the tires ... of 'election denial' types of movements or not."
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R. Michael Alvarez, a CalTech professor of political and computational social science, said American election officials weathered foreign disinformation, strong voter turnout, hurricanes that impacted Florida, North Carolina and other states, and still got the job done.
"Our election process and our electoral system in the United States showed amazing resilience yesterday," Alvarez said. "I just think it was really a kind of a remarkable day for election administration."
Election disinformation is here to stay. It's too profitable.
You'll hear more about the bad news as we wait to see if Republicans retain control of the U.S. House, which would give that party a lock on Congress and the White House come January.
Justin Grimmer, a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, noted that some groups are pointing to a lower voter turnout in 2024, as compared with 2020, to suggest that is proof that there were "fake votes" cast four years ago.
"There is this big Fraud Industrial Complex that's now built around claims made that there's lots of fraud going on in U.S. elections," Grimmer said. "It's hard to put that genie back in the bottle."
There's a reason for that, according to Stewart, who directs the MIT Election Data + Science Lab: There's money in misinformation.
"What we're seeing now are groups that are arising specifically to keep the controversy going and to make money on it and to try to expand the view," Stewart said.
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It could take more than a week before we know which party won control of the House. That's a window for election denial grifters to attack the counting of ballots as corrupt. They probably won't have any evidence to offer, but they will want your money all the same.
"It presents opportunities for the types of controversies we were anticipating with the presidential election to go down to places like California, that have generally been outside the public spotlight with respect to election administration," Stewart said. "So we're not out of the woods yet."
Will Republicans push for federal legislation on elections? They already have.
Ben Ginsberg, an attorney who served as national council for four Republican presidential campaigns from 2000 to 2012, is now watching to see if members of Congress from his party propose federal legislation for issues like noncitizen voting and voter ID.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson led just such a push this year, even threatening a government shutdown if he didn't get his way with legislation. Johnson and his allies backed down to avoid a political backlash. That was always more about injecting the false claim of widespread noncitizen voting than actually producing any kind of policy.
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Here's a hint to how that might go – the standard Republican tactic has long been to limit voter turnout, since a smaller electorate tended to be more beneficial to the party. Trump's coalition building has changed that.
"In all the years I was doing Republican campaigns, low turnout was considered an advantage for the Republican Party," Ginsberg said. "But I think his recruitment of low-propensity voters and non-college-educated whites has led to this phenomenon that changed the basis of the party, it seems to me as evidenced in this election."
Both political parties have to figure out what kind of turnout is preferred
Jonathan Rodden, a political science professor at Stanford University, said the shift to low-propensity voters now leaning Republican may impact how that party shapes policy when it comes to casting ballots.
"A lot of this stuff that they have been pushing in the past operated under the notion that lower turnout was better and that low-propensity voters were likely to be Democrats," Rodden said. "And now that that's clearly not the case, it seems like it changes the game for both parties in ways that I don't think we've come to grips with yet."
Could making it more challenging to vote become a weakness for Republicans, who for so long have projected that as a strength? That would be, to me, the biggest surprise of this election's results.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Trump won through a secure election system. That's good news