With the 2024 presidential election less than one week away, MAGA Republicans – led by convicted felon Donald Trump – are organizing to overturn the election results, pushing harder than ever to amplify conspiracy theories about our election processes and security. House Speaker Mike Johnson, far-right Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, and MAGA officials in the states are using their positions to do Trump‘s bidding and act as an arm of his struggling campaign. MAGA Republicans are focused on sowing doubts in our elections to attempt another coup if they lose the election again in November, and continue to represent one of the greatest threats to our democracy and the future of our country.
NBC News: Before Election Day, Trump Is Increasingly Sowing Doubts About The Results.
- “As Election Day approaches, former President Donald Trump has increasingly been warning that if he loses, it will be because of cheating. ‘They’re going to cheat. They cheat. That’s all they want to do is cheat,’ Trump said of Democrats during a rally this month in Juneau, Wisconsin. ‘It’s the only way they’re going to win. And we can’t let that happen, and we can’t let it happen again. We’re going to have no country.’”
- “Trump has long inaccurately claimed that he is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and false claims of Democratic meddling have been a centerpiece of his campaign this cycle. But by pre-emptively raising doubts about the results, Trump is setting the stage to possibly challenge the outcome and throw the electoral system into chaos again. An NBC News analysis found that Trump mentioned Democrats’ likelihood of cheating in the November election at 14 of his last 20 rallies. By comparison, over the summer, Trump referred to Democrats trying to cheat in the 2024 race just five times in 20 rally speeches.”
- “Democrats are already preparing for Trump to either declare a premature victory on election night or legally challenge the results if he loses. Some of Trump’s allies have also speculated to NBC News that they anticipate he may declare himself the winner even if the results are not yet settled.”
The New York Times: Trump Hints at ‘Little Secret’ With House Republicans, Setting Off a Panic.
- “In this case, the worst is very bad: It is a scenario in which Mr. Johnson, who worked with Mr. Trump to undermine the 2020 election results, would again be in cahoots with the former president to steal the election and stop the certification of the results on Jan. 6, 2025, should Vice President Kamala Harris win. In a statement provided to The New York Times, the mild-mannered Mr. Johnson did nothing to alleviate those fears. Instead, he seemed to confirm that there was, in fact, a ‘little secret’ — and that he planned to keep it that way.”
Politico: Freedom Caucus Leader Endorses Radical Proposal For North Carolina To Hand Its Electoral Votes To Trump.
- “The chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus says the North Carolina Legislature should consider allocating the state’s presidential electors to Donald Trump even before votes are counted in the swing state. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Thursday that such a step by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature ‘makes a lot of sense’ given the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in the western part of the state. Counties in that region are expected to vote heavily for Trump.”
- “Harris’ comments were in response to a keynote speech by Ivan Raiklin, a pro-Trump activist who has long embraced a radical strategy of state legislatures guaranteeing Trump’s reelection if they deem the 2024 election tainted by fraud and corruption. Raiklin posted a video of his full speech on X as well as a separate clip of his exchange with Harris. In his remarks, Raiklin argued that in addition to North Carolina, Republican-controlled legislatures in New Hampshire, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia and Wisconsin could take similar steps by meeting on Election Day and awarding their electors to Trump. Harris asked Raiklin how he could justify his plan in other states that were unaffected by storm damage.”
The New York Times: What to Know About the Looming Election Certification Crisis.
- “The false narrative of a stolen election that inspired hundreds of Americans to storm the U.S. Capitol in 2021 is now fueling a far more sophisticated movement, one that involves local and state election boards across the country. What was once the Stop the Steal movement is now the “voter integrity” movement. Its aim is to persuade the people who are responsible for certifying local elections of the false notions that widespread fraud is a threat to democracy and that they have the authority and legal duty to do something about it: Deny certification of their local elections.”
NBC News: ‘Big Lie’ 2.0: How Trump’s False Claims About Noncitizens Voting Lay The Groundwork To Undermine The Election.
- “In contrast to 2020, when Trump and his backers tossed out an array of false election interference allegations — many ludicrous, quickly struck down by courts — Republicans in this election cycle are almost entirely focused on the specter of noncitizen voting, a claim all the more appealing because of the difficulty of proving something isn’t happening. It’s a reboot of Trump’s 2020 election denial, focused on a specific enemy with a more robust strategy, one that has already achieved some success with this clearer — if no less false — message. The claim has spread widely online and in the real world, driving consequences that could shape the election and beyond.”
- “Well-funded conservative groups are systematically deploying the manufactured threat of noncitizen voting to pump up their base, to file restrictive federal and state voting measures and purge tens of thousands of voters from the rolls, and to flood the courts with lawsuits that plant doubt about the security of the upcoming election, opening the door to delays in the certification of results. It has been the hot topic of congressional hearings, million-dollar ad buys, right-wing media, domestic disinformation projects and campaign rallies. And it’s already caused harm, with voters disenfranchised, progressive canvassers and Latino activists harassed, and the normalization of an anti-immigrant conspiracy theory that has motivated horrific mass violence: the belief that a group of elites is using immigration to orchestrate the extinction of white Americans.”
CNN: House GOP Committee That Oversees Elections Hired Two Former Trump Officials Involved In 2020 Fake Elector Scheme.
- “House Republicans on the committee with broad jurisdiction over national elections have hired at least two former Donald Trump campaign officials involved in the 2020 fake electors scheme as the GOP-led panel gears up to take center stage in an unknown post-election landscape when Congress returns in November.”
- “The overlap between Trump’s 2020 team and the GOP-led committee in charge of overseeing elections indicates that the same cast of characters involved in the Trump legal ploys are being stationed in key positions on Capitol Hill ahead of Congress’ crucial, yet mostly ceremonial, role of certifying the 2024 election on January 6, 2025. The hirings also signal that the House, currently under GOP control, is well-positioned to flood the zone with Trump’s new series of lies about ballots, vote-counting and the election process, and is laying the groundwork to challenge a potential defeat in November.”
AP News: US Voters Concerned About Post-Election Violence And Efforts To Overturn The Results: AP-NORC Poll.
- “Trump has continued to lie about fraud costing him reelection four years ago and is again forecasting that he can lose this time only if the election is rigged against him, a strategy he has deployed since his first run for office. His allies and the Republican National Committee, which he reshaped, have filed lawsuits around the country that are a potential prelude to post-election legal challenges should he lose.”
- “Trump’s wide-ranging attempts to reject the will of the voters and remain in power after his 2020 loss have led to concerns that he will again fail to concede should he lose to Vice President Kamala Harris. Nearly 9 in 10 voters said the loser of the presidential election is obligated to concede once every state has finished counting its votes and legal challenges are resolved, including about 8 in 10 Republicans. But only about one-third of voters expect Trump to accept the results and concede if he loses. Democrats and Republicans have widely divergent views on the matter: About two-thirds of Republican voters think Trump would concede, compared to only about 1 in 10 Democrats. The same concern does not apply to Harris. Nearly 8 in 10 voters said Harris will accept the results and concede if she loses the election, including a solid majority of Republican voters.”
ABC News: Americans Accused Of Noncitizen Voter Fraud Face Doxxing And Intimidation.
- “A conservative election watchdog group obtained a list of the state’s suspected noncitizen voters and published it online, exposing Bonilla’s personal information alongside the implication that he — and hundreds of others — had committed voter fraud.”
- “Bonilla’s story highlights a real-world impact of aggressive efforts to purge state voter rolls of thousands of potential noncitizens who have illegally registered. Many of the names end up being newly naturalized citizens, victims of an inadvertent paperwork mistake or the result of a clerical error, experts say.”
- “Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections subject to up to a year in prison, deportation and denial of future legal immigration status. While there are confirmed cases of noncitizens illegally registering in every election, there is no evidence they cast ballots in significant numbers. […] A Brennan Center study of the 2016 election found just 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting out of more than 23 million ballots cast. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which maintains a database of voter fraud cases, has identified fewer than 100 cases out of more than 1 billion ballots cast between 2002 and 2022.”
The New York Times: Far-Right Figures Escalate Talk of Retribution and Election Subversion.
- “In the weeks after the 2020 election, retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Donald J. Trump’s former national security adviser, was a key figure in efforts to subvert the election outcome. In recent interviews and speeches, he and an associate are warning that this year’s election will be stolen from Mr. Trump, advising supporters to take action to prevent a theft and vowing retribution once Mr. Trump is back in power.”
- “In a September interview on a podcast dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, Mr. Flynn applauded right-wing activists who are surveilling election infrastructure as the ‘modern-day Minutemen of this cold civil war that we are currently facing,’ a reference to the Revolutionary War militia.”
- “In the years since Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Flynn has maintained a regular presence in far-right events and media where the former president is revered in near-theological terms, and where Mr. Flynn himself is considered a tragic hero of his presidency. Mr. Trump has occasionally signaled his ongoing endorsement of Mr. Flynn’s activities and hinted at a place for him in a future administration, though only vaguely. Calling into a live event where Mr. Flynn appeared last year, he told him, ‘We’re going to bring you back,’ to cheers from the crowd.”
The New York Times: How a Pro-Trump Army Built a Movement to Reject Elections.
- “Now, as voters and campaign professionals prepare for what promises to be a hard-fought election match, a smaller group of lawyers and longtime MAGA supporters is preparing the ground for an even harder-fought post-election rematch. And as they did in 2020, they are preparing to battle on the grounds of certification.”
- “[A]lthough the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated ‘election integrity’ movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must ‘do their duty’ and deny certification.”
- “The legal system does not make it easy to nullify the popular will, and in 2022 Congress passed a bill — the Electoral Count Reform Act — that would make it even harder, in part by setting an unambiguous deadline for states to submit their final certified results: this year, Dec. 11. But there is a path. The bill did not state the consequences for missing the certification deadline. A determined administrator could try to in effect run out the clock, creating a chain reaction of legal maneuvers that would culminate in the election’s being decided by simple majorities of the House and the Senate — each of which could by Jan. 6 be controlled by Republicans. The odds are small, but any administrator willing to face the consequences has a shot at overturning the election. ‘The whole system is dependent upon, one, everyone doing what they’re supposed to do, and two, doing what a judge has told them they have to do,’ Bradley Schrager, a Democratic election lawyer in Nevada, told me. ‘After that, we’re into something else.’”
Brookings: The Counties That May Try Not To Certify The 2024 Election.
- “Eleven counties located across four states—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania—pose a relatively higher risk of attempts at non-certification in the November 2024 election. Each county has distinct features constituting reasons for concern. But most of these counties have election boards in which the majority of the members have indicated that they may be open to interfering with certification this November.”
- “Efforts to block certification have all ultimately failed in the past. Nevertheless, we could see similar tactics in multiple counties this November. Although these attempts will likely meet the same fate as prior efforts, they could still stoke uncertainty and distrust. Before, during, and after Nov. 5, the situation should therefore be closely monitored—and appropriate election protection and anti-sabotage measures taken. Those responses have worked before and remain powerful.”
CBC News: Election Denial In Michigan — And The Fight To Contain It.
- “Antrim County, a sparsely populated, little-known part of northern Michigan, became pivotal in the rise of election denial in the U.S. after a mistake made on election day in 2020. The Michigan department of state has reviewed what happened and concluded that human error, such as not properly preparing ballot scanners or the ballots themselves, skewed initial voting results in the county of 23,000. Those preliminary results had U.S. President Joe Biden leading Trump by thousands of votes, even though the county had historically been a Republican stronghold.”
- “In fact, it became the spark Donald Trump used to suggest there had been systemic election fraud across the country. He cited what happened in Antrim County in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, before the riots in Washington and the attack on the Capitol.”
The Bulwark: Election Deniers Are Ready for Next Week. Are We?
- “The disruption is already underway. On Monday, someone lit a ballot box on fire and destroyed ballots in a swing district where a competitive House race is taking place in Vancouver, Washington. It was the third such incident in the area in recent weeks. More of this could follow even before Trump declares victory on election night—a declaration he’ll make no matter what the results are, just like he did last time. And it won’t require that much effort to cause mass disruption on Election Day. Harassment at polling stations to intimidate and dissuade voters—it comes cheap. Bomb threats at precincts in heavily Democratic areas like Fulton County, Georgia—just a phone call will do it. And just what are these 200,000 poll workers and poll watchers the Republican National Committee recruited to protect ‘election integrity’ planning to do? Polling stations could easily be shut down if they become sites of mayhem and unrest.”
- “The goal is to create delay and doubt about the outcome. While the courts are likely to ultimately force canvassers to certify results, a missed county or state deadline could be enough to prevent certification of a Harris victory. If states fail to finalize their results when they are required to do so, voting by the Electoral College on December 17 could be disrupted, resulting in delays that would create further doubt about the legitimacy of the election and give rise to a real possibility that the election will be decided by Congress. And as I mentioned, there are Republicans primed to do their part to help bring this about in every battleground.”
Vox: Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally Showed How Racism Is The Beating Heart Of Election Denial.
- “These remarks don’t just echo the far-right ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory — they update the GOP’s stolen election narrative with a new villain. While in 2020 it was ‘urban’ voters who were coded as the primary perpetrators of voter fraud, in 2024 it’s immigrants and noncitizens who are the avatars for fraud and would be blamed for another Trump loss.”
- “An array of Republican members of Congress, GOP activists, and state officials espouse similar beliefs about voter fraud to those promulgated on stage Sunday night, as do a significant proportion of voters — some 85 percent of Trump supporters are concerned about noncitizen voting. Those beliefs, research and polling suggest, correlate with a sense of racial resentment and fearmongering about a quickly diversifying country that tends to over-index among Trump voters.”
Wired: Election Fraud Conspiracy Theories Are Already Thriving Online.
- “Pro-Trump groups have spent years building election denial networks that, combined with Big Tech’s hands-off approach and continued foreign interference, have created a toxic information ecosystem.”
- “In the weeks before the 2020 vote, Trump and his allies had already begun to spread claims that the election would be stolen, but those allegations were vague and unorganized. Over the past four years, however, a well-funded network of election denial groups across the US have worked tirelessly to marshal their supporters and drum up conspiracy theories about voting machines flipping votes in the middle of the night, votes being shredded by the bagful, and ‘mules’ stuffing drop boxes with ballots. These conspiracy theories are being shared by right-wing election denial networks, the Trump campaign, and Russian propaganda groups. With a week left to go before the historic vote, fully formed conspiracy theories about threats to voting are being pushed to audiences that have been primed to believe everything they hear.”
The Atlantic: What Election Integrity Really Means.
- “A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the ‘Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.’ The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that ‘there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.’ That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.”
The Atlantic: The Next ‘Stop the Steal’ Movement Is Here.
- “The election is rigged. Democrats are already working to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the results are going to be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has been percolating through segments of the online right. Over the past several weeks, conservative figures ranging from the fringe to the mainstream have been priming their audiences to declare fraud should the election not go their way. ‘The Democrats are rigging the 2024 election just like they did in 2020,’ Laura Loomer, a right-wing troll and Trump ally, posted on the messaging app Telegram earlier this month. ‘From illegal voter registrations in Arizona, to widespread mail-in ballot fraud and encouraging democrats to flood the polls with illegal alien voters, they’re setting the stage to steal key swing states.’”