Trump’s 2024 Election-Denial Playbook

Before Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, you weren’t hearing quite as much talk as usual about Republicans scheming to overturn the presidential election results for the simple reason that most Donald Trump fans thought the White House was in the bag. Now with Kamala Harris leading Trump in all the national polling averages, and with Democrats giving rave reviews to their new nominee and her running mate Tim Walz, there’s less buzz over the size of Trump’s landslide in November and more anxiety about the GOP’s erratic warrior king and his weird sidekick, J.D. Vance.

So Republicans may have to pursue Trump’s many threats to overturn another “rigged election” after all. Here’s how they’re laying the groundwork.

Trump says there’s already reason to overturn a 2024 defeat.

Obviously, Trump and his supporters will jump on any election irregularities that favor Harris as they arise (or are fabricated). But Trump has already accused Democrats of committing “election interference,” which in his eyes makes any Harris victory illegitimate. Chief among these alleged dirty tricks are Trump’s many legal problems, including his felony conviction in New York; according to MAGA gospel, these cases are all completely made up for the sole purpose of keeping Trump from becoming president again.

This means that no Trump defeat, however overwhelming, need be accepted, no matter what happens between now and November 5. The case for a “rigged election” is already closed in the court of Donald Trump’s fever dreams.

Republicans are continuing their voter-suppression efforts.

One arm of Republican election preparations involves ongoing efforts to prevent a Democratic victory by suppressing potentially pro-Democratic votes. Trump has not revived the wholesale attacks on voting by mail that drove many Republicans to abandon “convenience voting” in 2020 and served as a principal rationale for his efforts to overturn the results of the last presidential election. But Republicans are still fighting in courts and in state legislatures to restrict the practice, at least where it might help Democrats.

Some of the early-voting rules and practices adopted in 2020 by both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions were dropped once the COVID-19 pandemic abated. But 17 states (plus D.C.) have adopted or retained one relatively novel rule: the acceptance of mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received afterwards (usually by a specified date). Republicans are fighting to stop post–Election Day ballot receipt altogether, based on the belief that late voters-by-mail tend to skew Democratic (a hypothesis sometimes called the “blue shift” since it can produce Democratic gains as the last-cast mail ballots are counted). NPR reports:

So far the Republican National Committee and others have filed ballot return challenges in Nevada, Illinois, Mississippi and North Dakota.

Early this year, the North Dakota case was thrown out of court. And last month, judges in Mississippi and Nevada also threw out the lawsuits filed by the RNC aiming to disqualify ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Republicans base these challenges on the legal theory that the receipt of ballots after the general-election date abrogates the federal law specifying that date. They are appealing the Mississippi and Nevada decisions in hopes of finding a conservative appeals court that will agree with them. Nevada, of course, is a key battleground state where 40,000 ballots were received and counted after Election Day in 2020. In Pennsylvania, another battleground state, there’s a federal court battle over a state-legislative mandate that mail ballots include an accurate date indicating when they were filled out; an estimated 10,000 ballots could be affected.

In 15 state legislatures they control, Republicans have been tightening voter ID laws that tend to trip up entirely qualified voters who don’t have the requisite documentation handy; they tend to skew low-income and Democratic.

Perhaps the most rapidly growing technique of voter suppression this year has been citizen-initiated challenges to the eligibility of likely Democratic voters, particularly by the hoary vote suppressors of the Texas-based True the Vote organization. As Wired recently reported, the organization has been racing to purge as many voters from the rolls as possible prior to the federal August 7 deadline for voter challenges in federal elections:

Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, has argued for more than a decade that mismanaged voter rolls have led to widespread voter fraud. Recently, she wrote in her newsletter that True the Vote’s revamped IV3 tool, designed to automate the process of challenging voter registrations, was used by more than 35,000 volunteers. “To date, 6,937 citizens have completed 645,610 challenges across 1,322 counties,” she wrote. In a later interview on the right-wing War Room podcast, Engelbrecht said the number of challenges facilitated by IV3 was now more than 700,000.

The Georgia Republican Party was recently fined by the Federal Election Commission for illegally coordinating with True the Vote.

Some Republican-controlled states are trying to restrict or inhibit voter-registration drives. One typical example is in Florida, which now imposes serious fines on canvassers for even minor mistakes in registration forms. One important 2020 resource for both voter assistance and election office administration will largely just go away: The Mark Zuckerberg–founded Center for Tech and Civic Life will greatly ratchet down the grants it offered in 2020 to small and midsize communities for election administration, a practice Republicans demonized as “Zuckerbucks” on grounds that it tended to support Democratic-controlled jurisdictions (which also happened to be the neediest jurisdictions).

All these efforts may or may not reduce Democratic voting enough to make a difference, but by and large, Team Trump is leaving nothing to chance or to actual voter preferences.

The GOP is working to slow down election certification.

Aside from the end of pandemic conditions, the most important change in circumstances since 2020 was the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. This law made the kind of end-game coup Donald Trump’s campaign attempted last time around significantly more difficult, principally by clarifying the process for the state certification of winners and thus electoral-vote slates. But on the other hand, we won’t see a repeat of Team Trump’s highly improvised 2020 election-litigation strategy; his legal beagles have had nearly four years to examine where Rudy Giuliani’s lawyers went wrong.

It appears from activities in various states that a principal Trump strategy for setting up and even executing election challenges will be to slow down the certification of the results at the local level from the get-go, as the Washington Post reported in June:

When a member of Georgia’s Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections refused to join her colleagues as they certified two primaries this year, she claimed she had been denied her right to examine a long list of election records for signs of fraud or other issues.

Now the board member, Julie Adams, an avowed believer in the false theory that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump, is suing the board, hoping a judge will affirm that right and potentially empower others in similar positions elsewhere to hold up the outcome of elections. …

In addition to Georgia, local officials in at least four other battleground states have made pushes to seize control of the certification process, heightening worries that pro-Trump forces will try similar moves in the fall.

In Georgia, the Republican majority on the state election board is giving potential certification footdraggers a big boost, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:

A new Georgia election rule approved Tuesday requires an undefined “reasonable inquiry”before certifying results, potentially giving partisan county election board members more discretion to reject the outcome.

The Georgia Election Board voted 3-2 to finalize the rule, which was supported by the same three Republican members that Donald Trump praised at a rally Saturday in Atlanta. A crowd of mostly Republican voters at the meeting cheered when the rule passed.

And in Pennsylvania, Republican legislators very deliberately threw sand in the election-certification gears by refusing to modify an archaic law that prevents the counting of mail ballots before Election Day, which was a major reason the count in that state was so slow in 2020.

What will Team Trump do with the flammable raw material of delayed election certification? Well, for one thing, the former president himself will almost certainly repeat what he did on Election Night in 2020 and prematurely claim victory even if the trends foretell defeat. But this time around, the violence we saw on January 6, 2021, could occur much earlier in the process, perhaps as understaffed local election offices struggle to count and certify the votes. For that to happen, Republicans would need to ramp up the paranoia and the sense of urgency about obstructing normal procedures.

Trump supporters are raising alarms about (imaginary) widespread voter fraud.

Aside from Trump’s claim that this election has already been fatally tainted by Democratic “interference,” his allies can be expected to ramp up the unsubstantiated allegations that Democrats are systemically cheating, which makes cheating right back almost a moral obligation. Donald Trump Jr. already accused Kamala Harris of being a massive fraudster in a Fox News op-ed published last weekend:

[Democrats] have put America last, and non-citizens first, by opening our borders, dismantling election safeguards and embracing non-citizen voting. We deserve a secure system where our future is decided by our citizens, not this anti-American version of the Democrats. Led by Vice President Kamala Harris, they have undermined our country at every turn, welcomed the invasion at the border and encouraged non-citizens to cancel the voice of Americans. 

This is entirely imaginary, since there’s no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting (the best available study found 30 incidents in the entire 2016 election), and it’s already a crime punishable by prison and deportation. But the claim that Democrats have deliberately engineered an “open border” (also a lie) in order to harvest illegal votes has been embraced not only by Donald Trump but by Speaker Mike Johnson and many other Republicans. And lest we forget, in 2016, even in victory Trump insisted that “millions” of illegal votes were cast by noncitizens, principally in California — that’s right, Kamala Harris’s California. So we are going to hear a lot on this subject between now and November 5.

If you don’t think a fired-up MAGA base convinced that Harris is letting “illegal aliens” steal the presidency will take extraordinary measures to keep that evil plot from being consummated, then you have extraordinary confidence in the ability of Trump’s warriors to lay down the weapons they brandished on January 6.