2016 The most dangerous conspiracy theory of 2016 Trump and Clinton feed the rigged-election charge to their peril.

In a presidential campaign consumed by conspiracy theories, the most dangerous one looming over these final six weeks isn’t about President Barack Obama’s birthplace or whether Hillary Clinton is sick with more than pneumonia.

It’s the suggestion that the election itself won't be on the up and up.


Donald Trump and his allies are directly fueling the fire. The Republican who launched his political career on the wings of the birther movement has been sounding the alarm since summer that the results in battleground states – from Ohio to Florida – will be fixed so he’ll lose.

“We know it’s a rigged system. All you have to do is ask Bernie Sanders and you’ll see,” Trump said last week during a rally in Kenansville, North Carolina.

Trump’s campaign website is recruiting poll watchers to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” and it’s also getting air cover from a political non-profit group named “Stop the Steal” -- run by longtime confidante Roger Stone – that’s raising unlimited money from corporations and individuals to hire election experts and conduct exit polling that it says can go a long way to “prevent the THEFT of the 2016 Presidential election.”

But Trump isn’t the only one who warns the election is being tampered with.

Clinton’s campaign contends that the Republican’s shadowy connections to Russia may be tied to the slow release of hacked emails meant to embarrass the Democrat to the point that she loses in November. While Obama said in an NBC interview in July that “anything’s possible” when it comes to Russia’s attempts to influence the presidential election, the U.S. government still hasn’t officially named a culprit in the hackings.

“It’s a fascinating question, and an important question, and an alarming question when the Russian government appears to be attempting to influence the outcome of the election,” Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin said in a recent interview.

At the conclusion of the first presidential debate, both Clinton and Trump were asked directly if they’d accept the election’s outcome if they didn’t win the White House. Clinton immediately replied that she “certainly will support the outcome of this election.” Trump, by contrast, initially side stepped the question by suggesting it may have been “corruption” that led the Homeland Security Department to grant U.S. citizenship to about 850 people who had been ordered deported or removed from the country under another name.

Pressed again by moderator Lester Holt on the question about the election outcome, Trump replied, “I want to make America great again. I’m going to be able to do it. I don’t think Hillary will. The answer is, if she wins, I will absolutely support her.”

And certainly, allegations of vote rigging or Russian espionage won’t matter much if the 2016 election yields a lopsided win for one contender over the other. But if the polls are correct, the result on Nov. 8 will be close, and by pressing ahead with so much talk about manipulation at voting booths, Democrats and Republicans alike predict that a contested race awash in conspiracy theories would extend well beyond Election Day whether the loser ultimately accepts the result or not.

“I can imagine a scenario where Trump protests not for a matter of days but for months and months and months,” said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak. “You can’t have a third of the electorate believe the election results were illegitimate.”

Of course, conspiracy theories and wild rumors have long had a home in American presidential politics, from unsubstantiated claims advanced by Thomas Jefferson’s supporters that John Adams was plotting to attack France to Harry Reid’s inaccurate statement on the Senate floor in 2012 that Mitt Romney had been dodging tax payments for more than a decade.

It’s also common for White House losers and their allies to respond with a declaration they’ve just been a part of a sham election.

Democrats, for example, relished in reminding President George W. Bush during his first term about the 2000 debacle in Florida involving butterfly ballots, hanging chads and a divisive Supreme Court ruling. After Bush’s reelection in 2004, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., published a lengthy expose in Rolling Stone magazine questioning whether Republicans had stopped more than 350,000 votes from being cast or counted in Ohio, thereby handing the president a second term. During his final 2008 debate with Obama, John McCain claimed the community activist group ACORN was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” And after Obama’s 2012 reelection, more than a third of the Republicans surveyed by Fairleigh Dickinson University researchers said they thought the Democrat’s supporters committed voter fraud that altered the results.

But this presidential cycle is entirely different. Conspiracy theories have swirled around these candidates for years and both are running in a social-media obsessed campaign environment, trying to win over voters who are increasingly seeking out information via partisan news sources while discounting mainstream journalists.

Recent surveys show Trump is in lock step with his supporters when he raises doubts that he’ll get a fair and square election. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released earlier this month found nearly half of Trump’s supporters aren’t confident the votes will be counted accurately, compared with just 18 percent of Clinton’s backers who think the totals will be illegitimate. In August, Public Policy Polling found 69 percent of Trump voters in North Carolina think Clinton would only win if the election was rigged: 40 percent actually blamed ACORN, which officially disbanded in 2010, as the reason they expected mischief.

Donald Trump looks up as he fills in his Republican primary election ballot in New York on April 19. | AP Photo

Those kinds of poll numbers have both Democratic and Republican election observers worried, especially because of the sheer number of conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated rumors and innuendo that keep being made and repeated from the campaign stump, on social media and via partisan media outlets.

“It creates opportunities for the worst sorts of people to try to get political power through complete fairy tale,” said Richard Painter, a former senior ethics lawyer in George W. Bush’s White House who has endorsed Clinton’s campaign. “This is very dangerous stuff. If conspiracy theories start to take over you can lose your democracy.”

Added Eric Edelman, a former senior Pentagon official from the Bush administration, who has rejected Trump’s campaign but isn’t endorsing Clinton either: “It’s extremely dangerous stuff to be playing around with. It denies legitimacy to your successor.”

Trump and his allies have been setting the table for months that a loss in November wouldn’t reflect the true sentiment of the country’s voters. The Republican has been critical of federal courts for striking down state laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls and he even suggested that some Democrats would be “voting 15 times for Hillary."

Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has also repeatedly stoked supporters’ skepticism of the voting system’s integrity, telling a Georgia woman at a recent town hall that her concern about a fraudulent election was “well-founded.”

And then there’s Stone, the GOP operative who in frequent appearances on The Alex Jones Show has been talking about the prospect of a rigged election.

“No folks, it’s not far-fetched. It’s not outlandish. It’s not, as Barack Obama said, ‘ridiculous,” Stone said during an interview earlier this month on the popular conspiracy theory webcast. Stone, a longtime Trump associate who officially worked for the Republican’s campaign until last fall, said in an earlier appearance on Jones’ program that he’d been urging Trump for months to get ahead of the voter fraud story, telling the Republican he should be “talking about it constantly,” especially when he’s ahead of Clinton in the polls.

Speaking in July to Breitbart, Stone elaborated on why Trump should keep making the case about a rigged election. “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government,” said Stone, who did not respond to requests from POLITICO for an interview.

The allegations of Russian interference are different in kind.

While Trump during Monday night’s debate shrugged off a Russian connection to the whole affair – “It also could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?” – Clinton and many other election watchers are not flying blind in making this allegations. In a joint statement issued last Thursday, the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees cited their classified briefings to finger senior Russian officials for “making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election” and they even called on President Vladimir Putin “to immediately order a halt to this activity.”

A senior congressional aide explained that the Democratic administration is reluctant to finger Russia in the recent DNC hacking for fear of both emboldening Putin into ordering up additional hacks and to avoid being seen as taking partisan sides in an election where Trump and his associates have already made their own frequent claims that there will be voter fraud. “It puts them in a tough bind,” the Hill source told POLITICO.

So how far has the administration gone? Last week, director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Washington Post that “it shouldn’t come as a big shock to people” that Russia would try to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign given its Cold War history.

But Clapper also said he had an even larger concern. “What I worry about more frankly is just sowing seeds of doubt, where doubt is cast on the whole process,” he said.

U.S. and state election officials say they’re feeling the heat amid so much talk about a presidential campaign where the final results could be rigged, stolen or swayed by foreign forces. Last month, the FBI alerted state election offices about hacking threats in the wake of security breaches of the public voting rolls in Arizona and Illinois, and the Department of Homeland Security has signaled interest in designating the nation’s election system a piece of “critical infrastructure” akin to finance, food and energy facilities.

But many of the moves that federal and state officials make to secure the country’s voting system are being met with skepticism and backlash, and more conspiracy theories. Alex Jones’ program, for one, has done multiple segments questioning whether Obama intends to federalize or even cancel the presidential election. Last month, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told the Nextgov news service in an email that he worried “the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.”

Election officials say the notion that there could be widespread election fraud have been debunked by citing a series of media investigations and government watchdog reports. And while problems do happen because of outdated machines, lack of funding and human error, they are on rare occasions and not because of intentional fraud. Indeed, the National Association of Secretaries of State published an open letter on Monday insisting hackers couldn’t interfere with the election but still seeking more federal money to help secure voting machines.

“There are things we can and should be doing to improve and protect the security of our elections,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “But insinuations of widespread fraud and rigged outcomes are completely unfounded. That heated rhetoric just undermines faith in American democracy, which works because people have confidence in its legitimacy. That confidence is something that should not be casually and baselessly tossed aside.”

Government officials also note the country’s voting system isn’t susceptible to a sweeping cyberattack because the election is carried out via a patchwork of state and local efforts that operate to large extents on closed networks that are not connected to the Internet. “That works to our advantage, to be a real monumental undertaking, to try to effect the election nationally,” Clapper said last week.

Thomas Hicks, the chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, told POLITICO Pro in a recent interview that there is public debate after the election about “ideas and real solutions to improve the voting process.”

“But I want to make sure that we don't put fear into people, so that they don't go out and vote,” he said. “And that if they choose to stay home, they choose to stay home on their own accord, not because they have some fear that the system is rigged or that the system doesn't provide for them to cast their ballot and have that ballot counted accurately.”