Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Lohenger.

On election night, when things started looking not so great for Kamala Harris, and then when

Donald Trump was declared the clear winner of the presidential election early Wednesday,

there were the expected social media posts questioning the election results. But this time, many were coming from Democratic voters.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but there's a couple of things that I've been seeing

on TikTok over the last couple of days.

And I want to just put it all in one video of the things that are suspicious.

You can do with this information which you want, but I think when you look at it all

together, it's a bit.

Like, how could all of the swing states voted in Democratic governors, senators, and President

Trump? Where are all of the, you know, votes if there was record voter turnout that didn't end up

turning into voting? You know, I wasn't going to chime in on all the math not math and stuff.

But remember this data breach that happened like three months ago?

That was like massive. Did anything ever happen with that? I wonder like what someone could do with a whole bunch of names,

social security numbers, phone numbers. Some of the posts went viral, but without boosts from election officials,

like in 2020, these bogus stories of

election fraud will likely or hopefully fizzle out. Anna Merlin is a senior reporter at Mother

Jones covering disinformation, technology, and extremism. She says it's to be expected that people

will turn to conspiracy theories to try to make sense of a loss they weren't prepared for.

The best example is the 2004 election. John Kerry lost to George W. Bush. And a big thing that

happened in that election was that the exit polls were super, super wrong. Pretty much every exit

poll seemed to predict a carry victory, and there was a lot of kind of post-mortem devoted to this.

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