Close Election Driving Conspiracy Theories About Rigged Vote

Peter Smith
Canadian Anti-Hate Network

Source: MooreStudio/iStock

Swinging opinion polls and nail-biting margins defined the 2025 federal election. By all counts so far, Canada will have a minority government formed under the Liberal Party. 

What has begun to spread, even before voting opened on April 28, has been unfounded claims or suggestions of voting fraud. 

Canada’s most recent federal election was particularly notable due to the wild swings in popular opinion numbers. In December, polling found that the Conservatives had a 25-point lead over both the Liberals and NDP. 

After US President Donald Trump returned to the White House, spouting increasingly bellicose ideas of annexing Canada as a “51st state,” and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his intention to step down, the needle swung in the other direction. 

The tumultuous election run-up has driven a lot of the discourse around recent election denial from the far-right, including from people with large social media followings. 

The claims resemble the discourse around the 2020 US election, where numerous supporters of Donald Trump—including Trump himself—promoted the idea that the election had been “stolen” through deception and fraud. 

On the encrypted messaging platform Telegram, members of Canada’s extreme neo-Nazi subculture seemed to largely accept the result as legitimate, but view all major political parties as infiltrated by non-governmental organizations like the World Economic Forum. 

In some posts to social media platforms, many influencers intimate at the possibility of the election being illegitimate by asking vague questions or making statements that cast doubt, but do not go as far as to explicitly claim that votes were tampered with. Rather, they take on a posture of just asking questions, where deniability remains intact. 

“Do you believe that there should be investigations into Canada’s election results?” one account with just under 100,000 followers asked. The same question came from numerous US and UK influencers whose comments quickly filled up with circulating theories of how voter fraud took place, while others blamed the media for apparent negative coverage of the Conservative leader.

Some influencers outright said “Canadian elections are rigged” on April 28, before the polls had even closed, citing the large and enthusiastic turnout at Poilievre’s rallies as evidence he should have won. 

This includes a US influencer whose post claimed, “Liberals likely cheated in Canada just like they did in the US for decades with censorship, illegals, and voter fraud.” He also blamed Poilievre for being “weak” and failing to embrace Trump as contributing to the loss. 

His post, which includes a video of Poilievre’s concession speech, has garnered over one million views.

Others made different claims.  

Chris McKee, who released a video detailing his work for Elections Canada and a story about ridings being declared before counting had taken place. Primarily, his social media presence depicts McKee as an audio producer who currently runs a podcast focused on professional golf. His latest appearance was on a conspiratorial podcast, claiming suspicious behaviour in Durham, Ontario’s vote counting. 

In a video recorded from the front seat of a vehicle, McKee says there is something “really fishy” about the vote counting. 

Claiming to be a staffer at a polling station whose job it was to check that containers with ballots being delivered for counting were sealed, McKee says that before votes had been delivered, CTV, and then CBC, declared the Liberal Party as winners of the election.

News channels often offer projections on the results in ridings before votes are fully counted. Mistakes, miscounts, and errors do happen, sometimes resulting in vote revalidation. This includes the most recent race, where the riding of Terrebonne, QC, north of Montreal, double-checked the result and saw a riding called for the Liberals go to the Bloc Québécois by a margin of 44 votes.

McKee also responded to a news story about a revalidating of votes in Halton Hills flipping the riding for the Liberals with "if you can’t see the corruption that’s happening here……you need a walking cane."

In an interview with self-described businessman and entrepreneur Jim Ferguson, a conspiratorial live streamer who advocates that immigrants be removed from the United Kingdom, McKee says he is just “posing the question,” and admits the winner may have been a projection or an early call made by the station. 

Ferguson, who since the election has done multiple features on the possibility of Canada’s western provinces, wrote in the episode description, “Election integrity has been compromised.”

He added that “Mark Carney has already threatened the use of emergency powers — and possibly even military force — against any province that resists Ottawa’s control.” 

According to Elections Canada, to help speed up the reporting of results on election night, the Canada Elections Act allows the Chief Electoral Officer to make adaptations to the law to help ensure the “smooth delivery of an election.”

Counting of ballots from advance polls can begin two hours before polls close on election day, due to the high turnout of advanced voting. In Carleton, Poilievre’s former riding, the large number of names on the ballot allowed counting six hours before polls closed.

This has not stopped McKee, formerly the Canadian booking agent for members of the Wu-Tang Clan, from appearing on live streams that claim the election was rigged.

This includes an appearance on a YouTube show with over 50,000 subscribers that recorded and followed an election worker home after Election Canada employees were seen loading ballot boxes into a vehicle. This claim was fact-checked by the Canadian Press and the boxes were reported to be empty. This has not stopped the video from circulating as a type of proof of the alleged election fraud. 

This same commentator who followed the election worker read out an email from an unnamed election scrutineer who claimed that ballots marked with a pen were being marked as spoiled. 

The commentator did not describe any steps taken to verify the identity or claims made by the person who sent them the email.

Voter fraud is a serious accusation, and claims of criminality backed by evidence about tampering with votes, should be investigated. Individuals, including election workers, who attempt to influence people’s voting at polling stations are removed from their stations and investigated.

There has been no evidence presented publicly by law enforcement, journalists, or researchers to suggest significant voter fraud to date.

There have been attempts to influence this and past elections by foreign governments, including in the 2021 election, where it is believed that the Chinese state attempted to sway the election towards a Liberal minority government. Similarly, campaigns on the social media application WeChat were detected that were both boosting and deriding Mark Carney. 

Inauthentic activity on the social media platform X was also found to be boosting the campaign of Pierre Poillievre. An analysis by the Financial Times found bots posting over 350,000 tweets to influence the election in favour of Poilievre.