WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies had spent months raising doubts about the integrity of American voting systems and priming supporters Expect elections in 2024 plagued by massive and inevitable fraud.

The former president continued to lay the groundwork even during a mostly good voting day on Tuesday, making unsubstantiated claims related to Philadelphia and Detroit and highlighting concerns about election operations in Milwaukee. Shortly before polls began to close, he took to his social media platform to announce, without elaborating, “There is a lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia.” The statement prompted immediate denials from city leaders, who said there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

However, Trump’s grim warnings ended abruptly late in the evening as early results began to tilt in his favor. During his election night speechThe president-elect trumpeted a “magnificent victory” by claiming favorable results and expressing his love for the same states he had questioned hours before.

The messaging pivot was part of a trump playbook that many in his party have adopted: preventively challenge a loss with Claims of widespread cheating. but be prepared to ignore them quickly if you win.

In 2020, when he lost against Joe BidenTrump carried out the other side of that strategy: He spent the next four years doubling down on his efforts. the false notion that the election was stolen, striving to convince his followers that he was the rightful winner. The campaign managed to change minds: polls show that more than half of Republicans I still believe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.

In the weeks and months leading up to Tuesday’s election, many Trump supporters propped up alleged evidence of fraud that they abandoned when it became clear that Trump was ahead.

Several Republicans in Congress had also fought to demand citizenship test for voter registration and argued that there was no way elections could be fair without that extra layer of security. However, the legislation’s biggest supporters congratulated Trump overnight without repeating those concerns.

It has become a common trope to see candidates focus only on allegations of potential fraud if they have lost or believe they will lose, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who serves as executive director of the Center for Innovation. and Electoral Research.

“I think it’s somewhat telling that we’ve seen fewer allegations of fraud after an election that former president and future president Trump won,” Becker said Wednesday.

The strategy sets a problematic precedent: “If your preferred candidate doesn’t win, it must mean the entire system is illegitimate,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a history professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

As Republicans have often pointed out, it is not just their party that has refused to accept the election they lost. They often highlight the example of Democratic activist and former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams, who ended her 2018 gubernatorial campaign without explicitly conceding defeat to her Republican opponent, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

Still, Trump is the only American president who has taken action to try to reverse the results of an election that he lost resoundingly. The role he played in the violent January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol, after urging his followers to “fight like hell,” has been condemned by democracy advocates in both political parties.

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him on his election victory. Some widely shared left-wing posts on social platform

And for some electoral skeptics on the right, even their candidate’s decisive victory did not prove that the election was honest.

“They rigged 2020. We were not prepared. They tried to rig 2024. We were ready,” David Clements, a former prosecutor and conservative public speaker, wrote in a social media post.

It remains to be seen exactly how the incoming Trump administration might attempt to reform American elections. MyPillow founder and election denier Mike Lindell sent an email to supporters on Wednesday saying he had discussed with Trump plans to scrap the machines and return to “returning to paper ballots, counted by hand.”

Nearly all votes cast in US elections you already have a paper recordand election officials warn that manually count all ballots It would be more expensive, more error-prone, and much more time-consuming than automatic counting.

Becker said that while the absence of fraud allegations in Trump’s victory speech showed its hand, it was a positive development.

“If we can get to the point now where President Trump and his supporters believe in the integrity of our elections… I’ll take it,” Becker said. “We woke up this morning less likely that election officials across the country will be targets of potential violence, by name in many cases, and that’s a good thing.”

___

Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to improve its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.