By Amanda Carpenter
Protect Democracy
On election night four years ago, Donald Trump falsely proclaimed victory, over Joe Biden, a treacherous declaration that evolved into a Big Lie that is still poisoning the nation's democratic process, as voters now cast their ballots for a president to succeed President Biden. Today, Newsmakers presents a detailed analysis by the Protect Democracy* project of how Trump and his MAGA backers are much better prepared this time to subvert the election, if it doesn't go his way, and how events may unfold, beginning on the night of Nov. 5. -- JR.
The moment Donald Trump plunged America into a steaming vat of election denialism happened in the wee hours of Election Night 2020, when the then-president stood in the East Room of the White House and declared:
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election — frankly, we did win this election… We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
Unfortunately, we’re still in it.
Trump has centered his 2024 presidential campaign around election denialism and selected a vice presidential pick who embraces the cause. We should anticipate Trump will again dishonestly claim victory before the votes are counted, and his backers will attempt to deny the rightful winner from taking office if Trump loses.
They’ve already unfurled election lies to deceive voters to lay the foundation to disrupt and deny the results in the event of a loss. Their strategy — deceive, disrupt, deny — remains dangerous but can be more easily recognized and, therefore, stopped.
I. Deceive: Conspiracies and scapegoats
It’s happening again.
Just like in the 2020 election, when conspiracies about mail-in voting and faulty voting machines fueled efforts to overturn the results through political, legal, and ultimately violent means, more lies about voter fraud are being spread as a pretext for election deniers to discard the 2024 results.
“Noncitizen voters” are the scapegoat this time around, and spreading these deceitful narratives is the first step toward election subversion.
Protect Democracy’s new analysis on 2024 Election Subversion Strategies (and how to defuse them) explains how these lies are designed to sow doubt about how elections are run, encourage election deniers to interfere in the voting process, and, ultimately, prevent a rightful winner from becoming president.
One thing is markedly different about 2024, though. The false narratives started earlier and with more enthusiasm from the highest levels of the Republican Party.
To compare, in October 2020, voter fraud conspiracies were underway, but what became the election denialist movement was not organized until after Election Day. But now, in October 2024, Donald Trump is openly voicing these lies, the Republican National Committee has preemptively filed dozens of “zombie lawsuits” that can be resurrected after the election to cause chaos, and Republican governors and members of the House and Senate are stoking fears that the election is going to be “rigged” again. Key actors are already aligned on their deceptive messaging on a much earlier timetable.
The claim that is getting the most attention now is that noncitizens will vote and sway the election. Here are some other examples of what their shared narrative sounds like:
"Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English, they don't know even know what country they're in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them to come into our country." – Trump at the ABC presidential debate, September 2024
“We know that states are not requesting proof of citizenship and people check that box … so there’s going to be thousands upon thousands of non-citizens voting. If you have enough non-citizens participating in some of these swing areas, you can change the outcome of the election in the majority.” – GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson in an interview with Politico, October 2024
“It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in our elections. Yet time and again, we have seen Democrat officials oppose basic safeguards and dismantle election integrity provisions, intentionally opening the door to non-citizen voting in our elections. This is just the latest step in our fight to compel officials to follow the law: only Americans should decide American elections, and Democrats will be held accountable.”– Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley in a letter to election officials in eight states, August 2024
Such statements are deceitful to voters for a few reasons.
First, there is no evidence. Just as many bad-faith actors promoted conspiracies about 2020 voter fraud with no evidence, there is no evidence illegal voting is being encouraged or enabled in this election.
Past efforts to uncover illegal noncitizen voting schemes have only identified a tiny handful of statistically insignificant attempts. For example, the Heritage Foundation, which continues to spread disinformation on this topic, compiled data that found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting in the 20 years between 2003 and 2023. Trump’s first-term Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, filled with his handpicked members and co-chaired by then-Vice President Mike Pence, was abruptly disbanded after finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, officials in Texas and Florida allocated significant resources to root out illegal voting but have also come up short.
Second, noncitizen voting in state and federal elections is illegal. We have strong laws that bar noncitizens from voting in federal and state elections, and those laws come with stiff penalties. These laws include the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996.
Noncitizens can be deported or denied citizenship and immigration benefits if they violate these laws. Illegally voting in a federal election would be an extremely high-risk, low-reward action for a noncitizen to commit.
Third, election officials must verify citizenship to vote in federal and state elections or risk punishment themselves. The NVRA requires states to use a common voter registration form that requires an applicant to attest he or she is a U.S. citizen under penalty of perjury.
Citizenship information is verified using data from agencies like the Social Security Administration or state-specific departments of motor vehicles to ensure the information is valid. Federal law also requires states to conduct regular voter roll maintenance and remove ineligible voters. Agencies such as the Department of Justice and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission enforce list maintenance practices under the NVRA.
Fourth, these claims of noncitizens on voter rolls are misleading, raised on a questionable timetable, do not equate to widespread noncitizen voting, and have already harmed the right to vote for U.S. citizens.
Federal law requires states to conduct regular voter roll maintenance because people move, die, or are convicted of felonies daily. Routine maintenance updates records and catches errors to keep the rolls as accurate as possible. However, the law restricts systematic voter roll changes 90 days before an election to prevent people from being disenfranchised. (The Department of Justice’s guidance on this is available here.)
Knowing this is the law, a wave of officials in Republican-led states recently began raising claims about finding potentially illegal voters on the rolls. They did so within the 90-day “quiet period” window rather than earlier in the year when systematic changes can be made.
In late August, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose claimed to have found 1,930 and 138, respectively, potential noncitizens with voting history. (It’s worth calculating: Even if these claims were confirmed, this would represent at most 0.00011% of votes cast in Texas and 0.00002% in Ohio, based on the current numbers of registered voters there.)
Abbot and other Texas officials made similar claims in 2019 that didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
At that time, the secretary of state’s office stated it had identified thousands of noncitizen voters with a voting history. The Texas Tribune reported that “Texas’ assertions didn’t hold up” because “many of the flagged registered voters turned out to be naturalized citizens whom the state incorrectly identified as ineligible because it was using outdated DPS data from driver’s license and state identification card applications.”
The Texas Tribune report also found that the recent noncitizen voting figures Abbott has promoted are unreliable, as his office has at various times hedged the number as “potential” noncitizens voters, grossly inflated figures, and included “people removed from the rolls who failed to respond to letters alerting them that there were questions about their citizenship.”
This isn’t only happening in Texas and Ohio. Similar claims of noncitizens on the voter rolls were raised in Alabama and then became a pretext for a voter purge that affected natural-born lifelong Alabamians, as well as recently naturalized citizens legally entitled to vote. (A Trump-appointed judge temporarily halted this purge with an order issued on October 16.)
While these deceitful narratives about noncitizen voting are attracting the most attention, other troublesome lies with deep roots in conspiracy theories that emerged during the last election are also being amplified. These narratives often take the form of distorted stories about easily resolved clerical issues and unsubstantiated disinformation about voting machines.
The important thing to know is that while the details of these conspiracy theories may differ, the purpose of telling them is the same: to deceive voters, provide an excuse to disrupt voting processes, and deny a rightful winner from taking office.
II. DISRUPT: Threats, intimidation and harassment
Attempts to disrupt the election process can take many forms. It’s happening in five distinct ways now:
Frivolous litigation seeking last-minute changes: The RNC and aligned organizations have already filed nearly 100 lawsuits — primarily in battleground states — to challenge established election rules and procedures. The majority of these lawsuits make, at best, questionable legal claims and are almost certain to fail.
For example, in Nevada, the RNC is arguing that Department of Motor Vehicles data suggests that 6,000 noncitizens are registered to vote — but if past cases are prologue, the vast majority of those will turn out to be recently naturalized citizens. At the time of publication, courts had already dismissed cases in Georgia, Nevada, and Maryland, and plaintiffs had withdrawn a case in Pennsylvania.
However, success in the courtroom is not the primary aim of these suits. Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy to them. Should Republicans lose the presidential election, the RNC and others are likely to point to one of these lawsuits as “evidence” that the results are illegitimate and refuse to accept the outcome.
Policing drop boxes and harassing voters: Calls for citizens to be “watchdogs” in their states and local communities have repeatedly crossed the line into intimidation when the “monitors” have photographed voters, doxxed them, worn military-style tactical gear, or otherwise behaved in a threatening manner.
A chief instigator of such efforts is True the Vote, a self-appointed vote monitoring operation that co-produced the debunked election-conspiracy film “2000 Mules,” which falsely alleged extensive “ballot harvesting” at drop boxes; the film has since been dropped by its distributor in response to litigation alleging the film constitutes defamation and unlawful voter intimidation.
During the 2022 midterms, a group affiliated with True the Vote announced a campaign to monitor drop boxes where voters deposit their ballots during early voting periods. People influenced by that campaign showed up in tactical gear outside drop boxes in Arizona. While a court blocked the campaign, similar campaigns may arise, whether in the form of drop box monitoring or some other way to intimidate and deter voters.
The recruitment of confrontational poll watchers and observers: Some individuals are signing up to serve as poll watchers or observers as part of a national strategy to catch and expose preconceived notions of foul play.
Since 2021, some states, including Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, have changed their laws to vaguely grant poll watchers “reasonable access” to ballots or entitle them to “effective” observation.
Some of these laws also make it harder for election workers to remove disruptive poll observers. In Wisconsin’s 2024 state primary, various observers had to be removed by police for disruptive and confrontational behavior directed at poll workers.
Unlawful threats to election officials: Baseless allegations of voter fraud and alleged election irregularities have sparked extensive harassment and threats of violence targeting election workers, officials, and their families.
In many cases, officials targeted by election disinformation face a wave of threats after being named in those conspiracy theories.
More than one-third of local election officials have experienced threats, harassment, or abuse due to their jobs in recent years. Because women largely make up this workforce, they are largely the target of these threats. A 2024 analysis by Scripps News Service found that 80% of election workers in the U.S. are women.
Abuse of public records requests: Election offices have faced surging public records requests from election conspiracists seeking evidence to support their theories — with requests increasing as much as 700% since 2020. Generative AI tools may make it easier to file even more requests in 2024.
While tactics differ widely in approach and scope, election deniers are taking these actions to create the impression that voters, election officials, and political candidates are cheating. They all share a common objective: to disrupt or otherwise cause chaos in the electoral process.
Several safeguards are available to defuse the subversion strategies and can be employed to protect our elections. Defamation laws, anti-doxxing laws, the Voting Rights Act, the Ku Klux Klan Act, and other state laws can effectively constrain these harmful actions. For more analysis and information, please see our longer 2024 Election Subversion analysis here.
III. Deny False claims of victory
By analyzing the strategies election deniers employed in 2020 — and the actions many of the same bad-faith actors are taking now — there are five options they are likely to pursue to deny the results:
Making false claims of victory: Before the 2020 election, experts cautioned about the likelihood of a “red mirage” on Election Night, where Trump would likely appear ahead before many mail-in votes were counted and a “blue shift” would occur.
Still, Trump exploited the time-lapse between when he seemed ahead in the count and when the final result was called for his opponent to falsely claim that he won and any votes that tipped the outcome otherwise were illegitimate.
The blue shift is mainly due to self-imposed delays by Republicans.
Since 2020, election experts have called on states to take steps to speed up absentee ballot processing — but in two key states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republican legislators refused to support expanded pre-processing. And Republican-controlled legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina have added other new requirements that will likely slow down results.
For these reasons, experts again predict there may be no clear winner on Election Night in 2020. While there is no way to prevent Trump from telling lies, making false claims of victory, calling to disregard ballots, and repeating baseless allegations of fraud, all should be properly addressed as re-run strategies to deny the final results.
Refusal to certify on the county level. In 2020, Trump’s effort to overturn the election results included a pressure campaign directed at local officials in Michigan who were charged with certifying election results at the county level. Since then, county officials across the country (including in key swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada) have threatened or refused to certify election results, relying on conspiracy theories about election fraud.
However, certification is a legal duty; a court can order local officials to complete it.
This is why these efforts have largely failed.
Think about it like this: Those required to certify elections are like scorekeepers. Their job is to record the results, and then, if any issues need to be addressed, the states have established laws and procedures to verify the count, launch recounts, conduct audits, and resolve them promptly. Local certifiers do not have the power to challenge results, launch investigations, or otherwise stall the process.
For these reasons, officials who refuse to certify election results may be subject to criminal charges. For example, two Cochise County, Arizona supervisors were prosecuted on conspiracy charges for refusing to certify the 2022 election results; one pled guilty to a charge earlier this week, and the other is expected to go to trial next year.
While county refusals to certify have all ultimately failed, refusals are disruptions that can delay the election process and, by doing so, further fuel distrust in the process and outcome.
Interfering with the Electoral College process. The Electoral College has a strict timeline, and any delay in its calendar due to county certification issues, court interventions, or other unforeseen circumstances could have profound ripple effects.
Missing these deadlines would create uncertainty, risk the disenfranchisement of voters, and potentially lead to civil unrest.
To help resolve ambiguity in the Electoral College process and mitigate election subversion efforts, Congress passed into law the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022. Three new components of the ECRA are now in place that can help avoid a crisis at this stage:
The provision that only a governor (unless otherwise specified) can file the state’s certificates of ascertainment indicating the winning slate of electors.
An expedited judicial review of disputes regarding the certificate to allow for a rapid judicial process between December 11 and December 17.
Language clarifying that electors can only be selected on Election Day, with a limited potential exception to extend voting in the event of a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack.
Existing state laws also provide officials with tools to adhere to the Electoral College’s calendar, which is available below. Specifically, state officials can allocate additional resources to help counties complete their canvass (the process that accounts for every ballot and verifies that every eligible vote appears in the final tally) or ask a court to intervene and compel certification.
In some cases, a state executive may have the authority to certify on behalf of a county or to exclude that county’s votes from the state’s final tally.
Pressuring congress to object. In the run-up to January 6, 2021, the day Congress convened to count Electoral College votes, Trump and his supporters engaged in a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign to convince Vice President Mike Pence to stop, delay, or rig the certification
vote.
However, Pence rightly insisted he had no authority to do so. But many others acquiesced to these requests. When Congress met, several Republican lawmakers forced a vote on objections, based on conspiracy theories, to Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s slates of electoral votes. The violent insurrection interrupted a debate about the objections, but later that night, when Congress reconvened, 147 members voted to reject one or both slates.
While members may still object, the ECRA increased the threshold. Before the passage of the ECRA, the law only required one senator and one representative to lodge an objection to a slate of electoral votes and force a vote on the issue. Now, it takes at least one-fifth of each chamber — 20 Senators and 87 members of the House — to lodge an objection, and the ECRA limits the permissible reasons members can invoke for objecting to a state’s slate. As was the case before the ECRA passed, Congress can only go on to reject those electoral votes if a majority of both chambers then vote to sustain that objection.
The ECRA also clarified that the vice president’s role at the joint session of Congress is ministerial — to count the votes, not to adjudicate which state’s votes should or should not be counted.
Keeping the lie alive. In the 2020 election interregnum, after the election was called and the results were certified by Congress, Trump filed more than 60 cases challenging the results of the 2020 election. Although those were unsuccessful, conspiracy theorists continued to echo and embellish false legal claims and demand investigations.
In the spring of 2021, the Republican caucus of the Arizona state senate hired a small Florida-based firm with ties to the election denier movement and no election auditing experience — called the Cyber Ninjas — to conduct an unreliable audit that lasted months, cost nearly $9 million, and uncovered no evidence of fraud. Copycat “audits” popped up across the country.
In 2022, other candidates who lost their elections followed Trump’s example by refusing to accept defeat. 2022 Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh have continued to pursue challenges for nearly two years after their losses, while campaigning as candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, respectively, in 2024. None of these cases or investigations has produced evidence that the election results were wrongly decided.
These actions were beyond the norm. Post-election court challenges and audits are an established and necessary part of the election process, so long as they are grounded in fact. State officials oversee and conduct these processes regularly and have a proven model of fairly managing these operations. The National Association of Secretaries of State maintains a list of best practices.
The Arizona Senate and the (now defunct) Cyber Ninjas settled a lawsuit that accused the firm of withholding official documents, and the Senate president who led those efforts faced public backlash and retired.
Although there is no way of definitively knowing at this time what combination of tactics election deniers will deploy in 2024, becoming familiar with their likely menu of options and how those strategies can be mitigated and stopped is necessary to protect the election and put election denialism behind us.
*Amanda Carpenter, a conservative Republican and political analyst for CNN, is a writer and editor for Protect Democracy.
Project Democracy is a Washington-based, cross-ideological, nonprofit organization, "dedicated to defeating the authoritarian threat, building more resilient democratic institutions, and protecting our freedom and liberal democracy" via litigation, legislation, research and analysis in support of free and fair elections and the rule of law.
Images: Pro-Trump insurrectionists attack the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, in attempt to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election (AP); Amanda Carpenter (HarperCollins).
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