Former US President Donald Trump and his right-wing allies have already started casting doubt on the legitimacy of Tuesday’s midterm election results, according to a CNN report.
“Here we go again! Rigged election!,” CNN on Sunday quoted Trump as writing to his 4.43 million followers on his social media platform Truth Social above a link to an article on a right-wing news site that had raised suspicion about the voters’ identities of mail-in ballots.
The article from the conservative site Just The News references a letter sent in this regard by 12 Republican state lawmakers to a Pennsylvania public official to address the ID issue.
Trump and his allies, who seek to take the helm once more, had made a prolonged effort in 2020 to discredit the presidential election results, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims that the election was rigged.
As America approaches voting day on Tuesday, some right-wing Republicans are creating the grounds to discredit the election results if the party ends up losing the vote.
In the 2020 election, after being defeated by his Democratic rival Joe Biden, Trump claimed the election was rigged.
Back then, Trump took to his official Twitter account and said Biden “won” the presidential election on November 3, 2020, because the vote was "rigged."
“He won because the election was rigged. No vote watchers or observers allowed, vote tabulated by a radical left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!” Trump tweeted at the time.
For spreading these and other lies on social media, Trump’s account was later blacklisted on Twitter. Trump and his allies then created their own social media platform known as Truth Social.
Twitter’s new boss, entrepreneur Elon Musk, has said that Trump might be able to return to the popular platform.
Meanwhile, according to reports, 9 out of 10 Americans fear political violence in the coming days and weeks.
Democrats blame Republicans, Republicans hold Democrats responsible, and another third says both parties are equally responsible.
There has been a ten-fold increase in the number of threats against members of Congress than there were just five years ago.
Political observers say the re-emergence of Trump, while his right-wing supporters are apparently being cracked down upon by what he has described as the Democratic "police state" has revealed a national political culture plagued by self-righteousness, anger and violence.
Meanwhile, the incumbent president and former president Barack Obama, as well as Trump, each sounded the alarm over the growing threat to "democracy" in the United States.