It started with a post on Monday, a week before Election Day.

"Three Democratic female candidates for Congress have been hit by cars over the past few days," a social media user named James Tate wrote. The left took it from there.

SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah connected the dots for his followers. "So just days after Trump files suit claiming Alaska election is already filled with fraud someone hits her car," he posted about Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola. "MAGA terrorism?"

The replies piled up fast. "There are no coincidences," one user declared. "Looks like attempted murder," wrote another. "Are these assassination attempts?" asked a third.

There was just one problem with the sinister pattern. Somebody checked the dates.

Tate's three victims were Peltola, Heidi Kuhn of Tennessee, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio. Kaptur was hit by a driver who fled the scene in Toledo, on August 2.

That's nearly three months before "the past few days." It didn't take long for a community note to appear under Tate's post: "The accident did not occur in the 'past few days.'"

That leaves two crashes. Here's what they looked like.

On Friday, Kuhn, the Democrat running in Tennessee's 8th District, was caught in a three-car crash on Interstate 240 in Memphis. She broke her nose and upper jaw, and her husband was hurt too. Both are expected to be OK.

On Saturday evening, Peltola was stopped at a red light in Anchorage when a car hit her from behind and pushed her into the car in front. She and her family were taken to the hospital with injuries that weren't life-threatening.

So the alleged MAGA hit squad struck at rush hour on a busy interstate in Tennessee, then flew more than 3,000 miles to Alaska to rear-end someone at a stoplight the next day. And three months earlier, it had apparently warmed up in Toledo.

Anchorage police were asked whether Peltola had been targeted, and they shut it down. "There is nothing new to share and at this time, there are no indications that this was a targeted attack," said Gina Romero, who runs the department's community relations unit.

Nobody has suggested that Kuhn's interstate pileup was anything other than a pileup.

Here's the math the conspiracy theorists didn't do. Americans get into roughly 6 million police-reported car crashes a year, or about 16,000 a day. More than 900 Democratic and Republican nominees are running for Congress this year, and in the last stretch of a campaign, most of them spend their days driving from event to event.

With that many candidates on the road for that many hours, a few of them are going to get rear-ended. That doesn't make it a plot.