5 Psychological Reasons for Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theories

For 10s of millions of us in the United States as well as millions around the world, the week of the 2020 elections were some of the most stressful days of our lives. We were either going to be doomed to four more years of Donald Trump or get the fantastic news that the less of two evils, Joe Biden, would become our 46th president. Fortunately, we ended up with the latter, but for reasons we’re going to analyze, there’s a massive conspiracy theory that voter fraud took place to elect Joe Biden.

This year has had a lot of twists and turns, but what’s impacted us more than anything else is the COVID-19 pandemic. With the pandemic happening during the election year, we knew that this election was going to be different. For months, we’ve been told that we’ll be encouraged to vote by mail, and if we’re to vote in-person, we should take the necessary precautions to decrease the spread of the coronavirus.

Since mail-in voting was announced, Donald Trump started laying the foundation to undermine the election. Much like his tactics to win in 2016, he’s used the emotion of fear to rile up his base by claiming that mail-in voting invites voter fraud. In an effort to combat this, news organizations and political scientists have done their best to put the facts out there about mail-in voting.