As a researcher studying (since this summer) the Trump + right wing disinformation campaign to seed/spread this false narrative that the election was “rigged” — I’m honestly sickened to see so many GOP political leaders hitching their boats to this madness. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1345459874273120257

The narrative trajectory has taken twists and turns, like so many disinformation campaigns, throwing handfuls of mud at the wall, hoping something will stick. It’s the mail in votes. It’s the machines. It’s the sharpie pens. One after another, each claim has been refuted.

But that hasn’t stopped the smoke machines from pumping out more accusations. All smoke, no fire. And then these leaders go pointing at the smoke and saying “see, people don’t believe the election was fair, there must be something wrong”.

They point at their own disinfo campaign as justification for lawsuits & last ditch efforts to undermine our democratic process. This is no less than an attack on democracy. And it’s entirely transparent...

And it’s entirely transparent — from the original “rigged” claims to the rules forcing states to count mail-in votes late to the narratives claiming the inevitable shifts in vote counts (from counting mail in ballots late) were evidence of the “fraud” they’d been talking about.

It was so transparent as to be predictable. Here’s a graphic we produced a week before the election about what to expect on election day and beyond. I just don’t understand how serious people who care about democratic governance are still playing games with this.