[mlac]

Votes in a functioning democratic society are anonymous. You can vote one way and tell folks you voted another to "fit in".

But people become who they hang around. So if they are in a vacuum and they only hear that the election was stolen, anything else is fake news, and the president is telling them this, they may seriously believe that democracy is under siege.

Amp it up with technology echo chambers and reinforcing behaviors and you wind up with extreme situations where a group of people storms the capitol.

It's when people don't believe they can end up with similarly distorted views on a topic that they are susceptible to this themselves. This is along the lines of the Lucifer Effect.