"Stop the Steal!" Farage’s History of Claiming Voter Fraud Goes Back Years

Is Reform copying MAGA's election playbook?

Mar 02, 2026

“The electoral process is now dead.” a solemn sounding Farage informed listeners on Radio Four. A decisive by-election loss was a “rigged” result, he went on, the product of “abuses” and “big ethnic changes now in the way people are voting” due to the “state of modern Britain post mass immigration”.¹

The Deputy leader did not seem surprised. He suggested to journalists “You’ve got to ask yourself, is this Britain or is this Harare?”²

But it was not Harare. Nor was it Gorton and Denton. It was Oldham West and Royton and the year was 2015.

There is little originality to Farage’s claims of fraud in the Gorton and Denton by-election last week. His history of repeated and uncreative claims of voter fraud as an explanation for loss date back at least 12 years.

This is not an article about the legitimacy of these claims. Before the conclusion of the investigation, the validity of Nigel Farage’s most recent and loudest claim of election fraud is purely speculative.

Maybe he’s right this time. Fourth time lucky as the saying goes.

This article is about Farage’s largely neglected history of claiming fraud in elections that he didn’t win. As Farage vows to crackdown on mail-in voting and voting by Commonwealth citizens, is the PM-in-waiting learning from Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ tactics?³

Nigel Farage’s History of Election Denialism

Exactly a year before the 2015 election, Farage told viewers on LBC that there was “postal voting fraud going on on a third world scale in this country. I know it.”⁴

In the 2015 General election, many supporters claimed that Farage had won the election in South Thanet, circulating the hashtag #Thanetrigged ⁵ and successfully triggering ⁶ an investigation by the Kent police following complaints from non-constituents. Farage himself never formally acknowledged claims of fraud himself. That would change six months later.

In the December 2015 by-election, Farage’s evidence of fraud would progress beyond ‘I know it’ to claiming to have received “evidence from an impeccable source”.⁷ Unfortunately Farage did not publicly disclose this ‘impeccable source’ and UKIP’s formal request for a police investigation failed.

Farage would use this template again in June 2019 when the Brexit party failed to achieve its first MP despite finishing first in the EU parliamentary election a month earlier and widespread media prediction. Farage called Peterborough a “rotten borough”. A Brexit Party spokesperson was more explicit as to his concerns with the “Pakistani vote”.⁸

Columnist Rod Liddle summed up the sentiment of those in the Brexit party ecosystem well in an editorial for the Sunday Times:

“My suspicion is that quite a few those who voted in Peterborough, with help from community leaders, may have been people who do not speak English and may well have thought they were ticking a box to choose their favourite vegetable side dish – tarka dal, brinjal bhaji or Bombay aloo.”

“I suppose this last comment will be considered a racist aside.” he perceptively noted.⁹

It is maybe worth noting that every claim of voter fraud was eventually thrown out for lack of evidence. More broadly, despite Farage’s long time obsession with Mail-in-voting (a transatlantic trait), instances of fraud through this method have been repeatedly shown to be negligible.¹⁰

In the 2024 election campaign, Farage toned down his rhetoric from 2019, but still claimed that there was “corruption in our postal vote system and many other things”.¹¹ In the same interview he echoed allegations that Biden had won the 2020 election due to “vote harvesting”.

America’s Playbook

Until recently Trump’s so-called ‘election denial’ did not seem to be working.

His legal challenges to the 2020 election all failed. Republican governors were unwilling to fabricate results ¹² and his Vice President was unwilling (and incapable)¹³ of overriding them.

Despite its violence, January 6 itself could hardly be called a success. The general public mostly blamed Trump for inciting is supporters to violence. As he left office, he held the highest final disapproval rating since Nixon.¹⁴ Voters seemed to punish those who latched on to claims of 2020 victory in the 2022 midterms.

However, ‘Trump 2’ has utilised election denial in a more effective manner than zip-tying legislators until they make you president. Trump has repeatedly called for Republicans to “take over” voting, calling for the 2026 election to be “nationalised”.¹⁵

This violation of the Constitution’s election clause is (officially) a product of the President’s concern for voter fraud committed by immigrants. As Trump ally Steve Bannon put it when calling on the President to deploy the US military and ICE to polling stations in Democratic states, “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again [...] We will never again allow an election to be stolen.”¹⁶

Unlike his American counterpart, Nigel Farage doesn’t wear authoritarianism on his sleeve. Whilst sometimes praising authoritarian regimes, Farage has not promised to be a ‘dictator on day one’.

Maybe Farage is different from Trump. It’s hard to know for certain how someone will govern before they do. But there are quite strong similarities on claims of fraud.

A British Trump?

For three hundred years, the British people have taken great pride in being too cynical to fall for wannabe authoritarians compared to our neighbours.

“Why is the Goose-step not used in England?” George Orwell once wrote, “It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.”¹⁷

But if the British naturally people recoil from bombastic despots, we would expect authoritarianism to come in a more respectable package.

Reform has embraced a fairly useful line for any future election loss. Any future loss can be pinned on fraud by immigrants.

Does Farage genuinely believe this? Does he believe that his popularity is so great that whenever he loses an election it’s because of voter fraud by immigrants? Maybe. But maybe Trump genuinely believed that the dead former president of Venezuela headed an international communist plot to rig the election in favour of Joe Biden. ¹⁸

Fundamentally it doesn’t matter if Farage genuinely believes all of his claims of rigged elections over the last decade or not. We have seen in America what happens if politicians can convince their supporters to believe them and over the next nine months we will see how far it can go.

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