If conspiracy theories were just some harmless hobby, they wouldn’t bother me as much. But there are real world impacts if people in positions of power and authority believe them. (This includes voters.)

A prime example is Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. After the dust settled from that election, there were many independent (and not so independent) investigations into claims of widespread election fraud. None of them uncovered any widespread efforts to “steal” the election. This includes a deep dive conducted by the Republican-led state legislature in Arizona. At the end of their research, they discovered that there were even more votes for Biden than in the initial tally.

There will always be individuals who try to cheat. But that is different than claims of a conspiracy among several people, or an entire organization entrusted with ensuring free and fair elections for people legally allowed to vote.

But Donald Trump has a large following, and he convinced a lot of people that there was a conspiracy that resulted in a “stolen election.” He railed against vote by mail. He railed against election laws. He railed against anything that he could point to besides his own failed bid.

So, what happened? Republican legislators across the country pushed for changes to the election system. While some of these changes are good and necessary, some of them are a step backwards in election security and accessibility.

I would say that an even bigger problem is the number of citizens who called or wrote to election workers with threats of violence. I worked in a county clerk office when this happened. Note that I lived in a Republican-dominated county, and the county clerk was a Republican. But this clerk knew that Utah’s election process was sound, and he didn’t jump on the election fraud bandwagon. His car was vandalized twice. Workers in our elections office received threats.

This happened nationwide.

The result is that many elections workers decided that it just wasn’t worth it. They’re process administrators, not martyrs for a cause.

So, what happened? They quit. They retired. They didn’t run for office again.

In Utah, 2/3 of our experienced elections officials quit. Nationwide, that number is probably 40%.

What do you think happened next? What that much experience exits, it leaves a vacuum. And who do you think replaced that experience? With a voter base who is up in arms about election fraud?

They were replaced by fellow election deniers who are convinced that the current system is corrupt and they have to create a better way.

What you have then are elections that make it harder for valid voters to have their vote counted. You have elections that are even more susceptible to fraud.

In Utah county, for example, (a county that is about as red as it gets), the Lieutenant Governor’s audit of the 2024 primary election found that the elections office rejected voter signatures at a rate five times higher than the state average. That means five times as many voters had to jump through additional hoops in order to have their vote count.

In addition, because this county clerk tries to undermine and circumvent voting by mail at every opportunity, he created a new “fast cast” system where a voter can bring their mail-in ballot to a polling location and have it be scanned and counted on the spot. The problem is that, in order to do this, they had to disable security features in the scanning machine, because the system isn’t designed to allow that. The result? The audit discovered 19 votes that were improperly counted.

From the report:

The fast cast voting process as implemented in the 2024 primary election lacked key statutory controls and created an environment where fraudulent and/or unauthorized ballots were cast.

This is the real world impact of conspiracy theories when enough people buy into them.