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election denial
'Trump Is Trying to End Our Democracy': Alarm as President Attacks Elections Ahead of Midterms
"He’s reviving conspiracy theories about mail voting, pushing voter suppression, and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented federal takeover of our elections."
Jul 17, 2026
Four months out from the critical November midterms, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address on Thursday night attempting to sow doubt about the integrity of US elections, repeating well-worn lies about the 2020 contest that he lost and claiming to have uncovered a sprawling Chinese plot to meddle in the voting process.
Trump, who has said his administration should "take over" US elections that are currently run by states, asserted in his speech that the American voting system was "left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen" by his political enemies and accused China of "illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files" in an effort to undermine him. Trump's speech coincided with the declassification of intelligence purportedly revealing China's "sinister" scheme to disrupt US elections as well as attempts by "members of the Deep State" to "suppress and downplay" the scheme.
Experts and critics of the president said his speech cherrypicked intelligence agency findings to concoct a false, self-serving narrative about the vulnerability of US elections and the need for legislation such as the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that Trump has obsessively worked to push through Congress.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that Trump "selectively declassified intelligence to try to rewrite the history of an election he lost."
"Even his own document release does not support his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It confirms what we’ve long known: Foreign adversaries targeted our democracy, but there is no evidence they changed a single vote or altered the casting or counting of ballots," said Krishnamoorthi. "President Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square. If he cared about election security, he wouldn’t be putting unqualified political loyalists in charge of our intelligence agencies or weakening the agencies responsible for protecting our elections from foreign threats."
"Instead," Krishnamoorthi added, "he’s reviving conspiracy theories about mail voting, pushing voter suppression, and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented federal takeover of our elections—all while ignoring the real challenges facing American families.”
During his speech, Trump lashed out at major TV news networks for declining to broadcast his speech live and in full, accusing media outlets of being "part of the plot" and calling for the "revocation" of NBC and ABC's broadcast licenses.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Trump's threat "insane."
"At a time when millions of Americans are finding it harder to pay for groceries, housing, and healthcare, when the climate crisis is causing record heatwaves and forest fires, Donald Trump felt it appropriate tonight to spew conspiracy theories about the 2020 election," said Sanders. "Pathetically, in true authoritarian fashion, he even threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC and NBC because they would not cover his speech."
"All of us, regardless of our political views, must stand together against this dangerous president who is seeking to undermine our Constitution and our basic freedoms," Sanders added.
"Trump is laying the groundwork to dismantle our elections, overturn results he does not like, cancel the will of the people, and hold onto power by any means necessary."
Trump's address cited "raw intelligence" that he said shows an attempt by China "to manufacture illegal ballots" for former President Joe Biden. The president claimed, without evidence, that the intelligence was maliciously "buried by rogue bureaucrats."
But, as The Washington Post observed, "raw intelligence reports are often wrong, incomplete, or contradictory, and spy agencies rely on judgments by expert analysts to vet and piece together the information to make conclusions with different levels of confidence."
"Officials in 2020 disagreed about whether China wanted Trump to lose and about whether Beijing took any steps to undermine him—a controversy noted in a declassified 2021 report. That report described consensus on the conclusion that neither China nor any other foreign actors had tampered with any votes," the Post noted. "The hundreds of pages of documents released online by the White House during Trump’s speech did not appear to support Trump’s contention that China interfered in the 2020 election to try to defeat him or that US intelligence officials deliberately hid information about Beijing’s intentions from him."
Robert Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, characterized Trump's speech as an attempt to divert public attention from his administration's "catastrophic policy failures and plummeting approval ratings."
"Trump is waging an illegal, unconstitutional, and utterly pointless war that continues to put American and Iranian lives in jeopardy and drive up gas prices. Corporations are setting prices out of reach for people being paid too little," said Weissman. "Trump rammed through tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cutting healthcare and food assistance for millions and millions of people. An out-of-control paramilitary force is kidnapping people off our streets and killing them at shocking rates. Trump’s delusional rantings tonight are a transparent effort to distract from these realities."
Living United for Change in Arizona, a pro-democracy organization, warned that "Trump is trying to end our democracy in front of our very eyes."
"Tonight Donald Trump stood before the nation and attempted to rewrite history, erase the will of the voters, and prepare the country for his next assault on American democracy," the group said. "We must call this what it is. Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to dismantle our elections, overturn results he does not like, cancel the will of the people, and hold onto power by any means necessary."
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Analysis Identifies 50+ Election Deniers Vying to Oversee Voting Across US
The threat of election-denying candidates is particularly acute in Arizona, where they are running for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.
May 04, 2026
As President Donald Trump continues to push Republicans to aggressively gerrymander ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a new analysis has found more than 50 candidates running for key offices who have in the past engaged in efforts to nullify election results.
As reported by NPR on Monday, election watchdog States United Action has released a report showing that election-denying candidates are running for offices in 23 states where, if victorious, they would have a direct role in certifying future elections.
States United classifies election deniers as candidates who meet one of five criteria: Falsely claiming that Trump won the 2020 election, spreading conspiracy theories about the election results, refusing to certify the 2020 election, supporting litigation to overturn election results, and refusing to concede a race after being defeated.
In total, States United found at least 53 such candidates running for positions this year, including secretaries of state and governorships, that would put them in position to try to block or impede the certification of elections.
The threat is particularly acute in Arizona, where election deniers are running for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.
This prospective Arizona election denial ticket is headlined by MAGA hardliner Andy Biggs, who voted against certification of the 2020 election results as a US congressman and who is running to unseat incumbent Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
States United CEO Joanna Lydgate told NPR that her organization is tracking election deniers running for office to "provide voters with the most accurate information possible" and "understand exactly what these candidates stand for and whether they fundamentally believe in free and fair elections in this country."
As election deniers are trying to win key offices throughout the US, the Trump administration is working to get more directly involved in purging voter rolls ahead of the midterms.
According to a Monday report from CNN, "Republicans and the Trump administration are now testing the scope of the federal law that imposes that ban on 'systematic' removal programs within three months of an election, as President Donald Trump pushes for more aggressive reviews of voter rolls for non-citizens and other ineligible voters."
What this means is that states could in theory purge voter rolls just weeks ahead of elections, giving people removed from the rolls almost no time to file challenges.
Wren Orey, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project, told CNN that purging voter rolls less than three months before an election means there's a high risk that "voters won’t have adequate time or notice to be able to provide the documents that they’ll need ahead of the election."
"Maybe their birth certificate doesn’t meet the requirements," Orey explained. "Maybe they don’t have one handy, maybe they don’t have a passport. That could take months to get."
Brent Ferguson, the senior director of strategic litigation at Campaign Legal Center, told CNN that he was particularly disturbed by the Trump White House's involvement in this effort to manage voter rolls.
"It sets up a situation where the federal government itself is the actor trying to purge voters from the rolls in the days before the election," Ferguson said, "which is clearly illegal."
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Officials Plot to Have Trump Declare National Emergency in 2026, Raising Fears He May 'Hijack' the Next Election
"It's a federal strategy to control elections and rig our democracy," said a spokesperson for Fair Fight Action.
Oct 23, 2025
Voting rights advocates are raising fears that the Trump administration may attempt to "hijack" the 2026 election after a new report revealed that a top election integrity official suggested invoking a "national emergency" to justify a federal takeover of state-run election processes.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that during a call in March with right-wing activists, the woman who has since been appointed to President Donald Trump's newly created "election integrity" position within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had suggested that the president could declare a "national emergency" to give his government new authority to dictate election rules typically decided by state and local governments.
Heather Honey, formerly a Pennsylvania-based private investigator who came to prominence as a leading proponent of Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden, said this authority would come from "an actual investigation" of the loss, which she has baselessly argued was marred by widespread fraud.
In the US, elections are administered by states, with the president having no legal authority over how they are carried out. But Honey suggested that the Trump administration has "some additional powers that don't exist right now," and that by using the investigation as a pretext, "we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on."
Seeming to recognize the extreme step she was proposing, Honey added: "I don't know if that's really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory."
The 2020 election was subject to numerous state-level recounts and audits and over 60 failed court challenges in state and federal jurisdictions—many of which were dismissed by Republican and Trump-appointed judges for lack of merit and credible evidence.
An investigation by the Associated Press last year found that across the six battleground states Trump claimed were beset by widespread fraud, only 475 individual ballots out of millions of votes cast were flagged by election officials as "potentially" affected by fraud. Even if every single one of the ballots had been proven fraudulent, it would not have been nearly enough to swing the election result in Trump's favor.
Meanwhile, several aides and officials who served Trump during the waning days of his first administration testified before the January 6 commission that the president was well aware he'd lost the election, but continued to push false claims of fraud in an effort to cling to power.
Matt Crane, a former Republican election official who served until earlier this year as a consultant for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—which Trump recently purged of election experts—told the Times that officials who have roposed relitigating the 2020 election "are not coming with an objective frame of mind to say, 'Let's look at the facts and see where that takes us.'"
"They have their destination in mind and cherry-pick facts to help stand up their crazy theories, so there's nothing objective about it," he said.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration had begun this effort to reboot the election fraud narrative, with Trump tapping former campaign lawyer and "Stop the Steal" proponent Kurt Olsen as a "special government employee" tasked with reinvestigating 2020. Olsen has reportedly already begun asking intelligence agencies for information about the 2020 election and has also suggested he wants to purge government employees who are disloyal to Trump.
Trump has also sought to implement many of the proposals from the "US Citizens Elections Bill of Rights," proposed by the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a group of pro-Trump election deniers, of which Honey is a member. The group has become deeply influential during Trump's second term, receiving a briefing from the DHS in June on how a database run by the department can be used to verify the citizenship status of registered voters, according to a report from Democracy Docket.
The group has called for new restrictions on mail-in ballots, early voting, and to make it easier for voter rolls to be scrubbed and for election results to be challenged. Many of these proposals have made it in some form or another into Trump's executive order on elections and the SAVE Act, which Republicans passed through the House earlier this year, that would require all voters to show passports or birth certificates in order to register to vote, which voting rights groups have denounced as a "modern-day poll tax."
As Max Flugrath, the communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, noted, "Judges have blocked Trump's March executive order on elections—a move courts called an overreach that belongs to the states, not the White House."
"Despite the rulings, Trump allies are pressing ahead," Flugrath said. "The DOJ is collecting massive voter roll data, DHS is pressuring states to upload files, and Honey is spreading false claims and framing the directives as 'best practices.' It's election disinformation rebranded as policy." Those actions, he said, are being urged on by the EIN, which has promoted Trump "pushing the limits of executive power."
Honey is just one of many EIN members with a direct line of communication to Trump.
Trump has also elevated a leading EIN operative, Marcy McCarthy—who also pushed debunked theories of widespread illegal voting in Georgia—to be CISA's director of public affairs.
EIN's founder, Cleta Mitchell, was notably one of the lawyers present on Trump's phone call in January 2021 in which he attempted to pressure Georgia election officials to "find" him enough votes to be declared the winner of the state, which resulted in him being indicted three years later.
On a podcast with a Christian nationalist influencer last month, Mitchell likewise pushed the idea that Trump could use emergency powers to assert control over the election.
"The president's authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States—as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have," she said.
She seemed to suggest Trump was on board with the idea, saying, "I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward."
Flugrath said these statements, and those reported by the Times, "should be a five-alarm fire," as they suggest Trump will use past false claims of voter fraud as "a cover to hijack elections" in the future.
He noted that in April, Trump himself seemed to echo EIN's theories of sweeping authority, saying during a speech that "we're gonna get good elections pretty soon" because "the states are just an agent of the federal government."
"Trump is embedding EIN operatives into the government to push his election takeover agenda, all built on lies about his 2020 loss," Flugrath said. "EIN seems to be using a playbook to decimate the independence and fairness of elections: Sow doubt in elections, install loyalists in government, use doubt sowed to push an 'emergency,' and change election rules."
"It's a federal strategy to control elections and rig our democracy," he continued. "Independent elections are the foundation of freedom. If Trump can control our elections, he can dismantle other checks on power. Protecting free, state-run elections is the firewall between democracy and authoritarianism."
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'Office-Peddling' Pam Bondi Grilled by Senate as Watchdogs Blast Trump AG Pick
"The U.S. Attorney General should be the American people's lawyer—not a corporate lobbyist with a closet full of conflicted clients," said the head of the watchdog Accountable.US.
Jan 15, 2025
As President-elect Donald Trump's attorney general pick Pam Bondi faced Senate questioning on Wednesday, progressive critics opposed to her nomination cited her record as a lobbyist, her role in amplifying Trump's claims of election fraud in 2020, and her history of catering to corporate interests to argue she is unfit to lead the U.S. Justice Department.
Bondi, for her part, told senators in the first of two scheduled hearings that her Justice Department would not be used to target people based on their politics—though she stopped short of saying that the agency would not investigate foes of Trump. She also spent much of her confirmation answering questions about Kash Patel, Trump's controversial pick for FBI director whom she repeatedly defended, according to Politico.
Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for the watchdog group Public Citizen, was among Bondi's detractors who argued Wednesday that she is deeply unqualified to be the nation's top law enforcement officer.
"The U.S. Attorney General should be the American people's lawyer—not a corporate lobbyist with a closet full of conflicted clients, many of whom seek government contracts or are being investigated by the very Justice Department Bondi now seeks to lead," Golinger said in a statement.
After eight years as Florida's attorney general, Pam Bondi left that post in 2019 and joined Ballard Partners, a corporate lobbying firm that has also employed Trump's pick for White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. At Ballard Partners, Bondi worked on behalf of numerous corporate clients, including the private prison firm the Geo Group, Uber, and Amazon.
Bondi also served as a lawyer for Trump during his first impeachment trial and pushed Trump's claims of election fraud in 2020.
Tony Carrk, the executive director of the watchdog Accountable.US, went after Bondi's time as Florida Attorney General, writing that she "frequently played favorites with big corporate donors and political insiders at the expense of everyday consumers, patients, and the public good" while she held that office and that "nothing indicates Bondi would change her office-peddling modus operandi as America's top justice official."
Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert, who will testify as an outside witness Thursday at day two of Bondi's hearing, said Wednesday that Bondi's record could lead to a politicization of the agency and called her "unsuitable" for the role given her ties to powerful corporations.
Meanwhile, the civil rights coalition the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, joined the pile on in a statement submitted Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Ms. Bondi lacks the commitment to defending the core tenets of our democracy and the civil and human rights of all people. Indeed, her active participation in and support of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election ought to be disqualifying in itself," the group wrote.
But Bondi—who "acquitted herself coolly," according to press account—appears on track for likely confirmation.
Raising the specter of the pressure Trump has placed on his Department of Justice in the past, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked, "let's imagine Trump issues a directive or order to you or to the FBI director that is outside the boundaries of ethics or law. What will you do?"
"I will never speak on a hypothetical, especially one saying that the president would do something illegal. What I can tell you is my duty, if confirmed as the Attorney General, will be to the Constitution and the United States," said Bondi.
Bondi would not answer directly when asked whether Trump lost the election in 2020 and also would not denounce some of the former president's extreme stances, like calling those arrested for participating in the January 6 insurrection "hostages" or "patriots."
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'That's What Demagogues Do': Sanders Warns Trump Will Prematurely Claim Victory
"That's how you move a country toward an authoritarian form of society," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Nov 05, 2024
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders warned on the eve of Tuesday's presidential contest that no matter what the initial vote tallies show, Republican nominee Donald Trump will declare victory—just as he did four years ago—in an attempt to sow chaos and confusion as election workers tabulate the results of what's expected to be a razor-close race.
"Donald Trump, early on in the evening, will declare, 'Hey, I've won this election, and if there's any state that I lost, it's because of voter fraud,'" Sanders (I-Vt.), who has backed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, predicted in a video message to the nation released on Monday.
"That's what demagogues do," the senator added, "and that's how you move a country toward an authoritarian form of society."
Watch:
Sanders' warning came after Trump and his GOP spent the months leading up to Election Day laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the presidential contest if it doesn't go their way, repeating baseless claims of voter fraud and preemptively suggesting a Trump loss is only possible if the contest is rigged.
"The only thing that can stop us is the cheating," the former president declared at a campaign rally in Arizona last week. "It's the only thing that can stop us."
One recent
analysis estimated that Trump loyalists have majority control of 15 county election boards in eight key swing states, a potential boon to far-right efforts to disrupt the vote-counting or certification process.
Anticipating premature victory claims from Trump, election observers are warning U.S. voters to be on the lookout for a "red mirage"—which refers to the misleading appearance of a significant Republican lead before mail-in ballots are counted. Around 75 million Americans cast ballots in the early voting period, according to state-level tallies.
Reuters reported last week that "Democrats are readying a rapid-fire response to flood social media and the airwaves with calls for calm and patience with vote-counting should Donald Trump try to prematurely claim election victory."
Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned in a blog post Tuesday that Trump is likely to exploit a potential "red mirage" just as he did in 2020.
"Trump's nonsense claim that the votes counted earlier in the night were more legitimate than those counted later became the underpinning of his entire Big Lie, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol," Reich wrote. "It looks as if the 2024 election will be close. Early tonight, Trump is likely to appear to be ahead and again use that early lead to falsely claim victory. Mirages can be confusing, but if you know what they are, you won't be fooled by them. Please help spread the word about the red mirage so people know what to expect tonight."
The Washington Post noted Tuesday that "finding out who won the presidency may take days," observing that "election officials in key swing states are urging Americans to be patient as they tally results, a process that varies from state to state because each has different vote-counting laws."
"Polls show an extremely tight presidential race, and the closer the results are, the longer it will take to know the outcome," the newspaper reported. "The swing states that took the longest then could again be slow this year: Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada. If the race is close, other states could join the list."
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On the 'Secret Plan' Trump and Mike Johnson Have to Overturn a Harris Victory
Think races for the U.S. House don't matter? Think again.
Nov 01, 2024
The scariest thing at Trump’s quasi-fascist Madison Square Garden rally was not the vulgar and offensive rhetoric by surrogates like unfunny comic Killer Tony’s comments about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” and Black Americans carving watermelons for Halloween, as disgusting as they were.
No, it was Trump’s threat that he and GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson have “a little secret” to upend the results of the election. As Rep. Dan Goldman warned, Trump and Johnson may try to go to the House and throw out the certification of the electoral vote and turn it over to the Republican House majority who would hand the election to Trump.
Here’s how it could go down: MAGA operatives in swing states could challenge the allocation of electoral votes with the goal of making it impossible for one or more counties or states to certify the electoral vote on time, block both candidates from receiving the necessary minimum of 270 electoral votes, and throw it into the House for a so-called “contingent election” where each state gets one vote and Republicans are likely to have the edge with a majority of 26 state delegations unless Democrats flip this in the upcoming election.
Faithless Electors
Although most states award their electoral votes to the candidate who received the most popular votes in their state, the Constitution does not require them to do so. According to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, each state has the right to decide how to appoint its electors. In many states, this would allow one or more electors (so-called “faithless electors”) to cast their vote for a candidate other than the one who received the most popular votes in their state. This has happened nearly 100 times in history, although so far it has not changed the ultimate results. It could be different this time.
According to various state laws in 15 states, a faithless elector’s vote isn’t counted and a replacement is named. But in 19 states, their votes would count. Some of these states have enforcement mechanisms, but others, including Pennsylvania, do not.
In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Chiafalo v Washington that a State may "penalize an elector for breaking his pledge and voting for someone other than the presidential candidate who won his State's popular vote." But it doesn’t require them to do so.
Let’s say Harris carries all the safely Blue states plus only the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That would give her 270 electoral votes to Trump’s 268, the bare minimum for her to win. But let’s say there’s a faithless elector from one of the states that permit it, or a court challenge voids some electoral votes as discussed below. Then neither candidate would have an electoral college majority, which would throw the choice of the next president to the House of Representatives. Each state gets one vote and unless this election changes it, Republicans hold a majority of the states. So the House Republicans hands the election to Trump.
Court Cases that could flip the electoral vote from Harris to Trump
Meanwhile, there are several court cases that could flip the electoral college, particularly if the election is so close that it comes down to Pennsylvania.
In Republican National Committee v. Wetzel, the ultra-right wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that a state may not legally count a ballot mailed before election day that arrives for counting afterwards. As Mark Joseph Stern argued in Slate: “18 states and Washington, D.C., accept late-arriving ballots; the 5thCircuit’s reasoning would render all these laws illegitimate and void, nullifying hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of ballots.” SCOTUS could affirm or overturn the 5th Circuit. Although there’s probably no time to do so before election day, if it affirms the 5th Circuit between the election and the final certification of the electoral vote by Congress, it could disqualify the votes of countless Harris voters.
Meanwhile, in Genser v. Butler County Board of Elections the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that voters whose mail-in ballots contained a technical error (they were not placed in a second “security envelope”) would be permitted to submit a second provisional ballot that could be counted.
The Republican Party filed a motion for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and bar provisional ballots from being counted. If SCOTUS rules in their favor, it could disqualify thousands of Pennsylvania votes. Remember that in 2000, Bush defeated Gore by only 537 votes in Florida, when SCOTUS stopped the vote count.
With a 6-3 extreme right majority, SCOTUS could again hand the election to the Republican, Donald Trump.
Vote for a Democratic House
The only way to guarantee that the Trump/Rogers “secret plan” is to flip a couple of House delegation majorities from Red to Blue. That’s why it’s vitally important for Harris voters to vote in every state and cast their vote for the Democratic House candidate.
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Beware Trump’s Election Deniers Sitting on Election Boards!
The election deniers’s movement has spent years getting ready for 2024 with the goal of ensuring that a Republican is elected president.
Sep 29, 2024
For the past four years, former U.S. President Donald Trump has been building a cult of election deniers who believe his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
They don’t care that no one has ever presented a shred of credible evidence to support Trump’s blatantly bogus claim.
Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, 69% of Republicans, including Republican-leaning independents, have said they believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president, a direct result of Trump’s massive disinformation campaign.
Election deniers are preparing to try to elect Trump at all costs, no matter who the voters choose. An all hands-on-deck legal effort will be required to stop this from happening.
The election deniers’s movement has spent years getting ready for 2024 with the goal of ensuring that a Republican is elected president.
According to a recent study by the Center for Media and Democracy, there are 102 election deniers on election boards in eight battleground states. These election deniers, the study found, have majority power in 15 counties in battleground states, including seven in the critical state of Pennsylvania.
Now they are moving into action, preparing to throw up various roadblocks to help elect Trump.
One of their key lines of attack is to delay and obstruct the certification of the winner in their state. Under the Electoral Count Reform Act—enacted in the aftermath of Trump’s attempted 2020 election coup—the deadline for a state to certify its electors is December 11. Failure to meet that deadline could mean the electoral votes in that state would not be considered in the final tally.
If that happens in one or more states, it could mean that Trump wins the electoral vote majority or alternatively that the race is thrown to the House of Representatives where Republicans are expected to control a majority of state delegations and elect Trump.
(The Constitution provides that if a presidential race ends up in the House, each state delegation gets one vote.)
In 2020, Trump, in his infamous phone call, pressured and threatened Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes that would give Trump the win in Georgia. Raffensperger, a Republican, rejected Trump’s pressure.
Georgia is once again center stage.
Georgia’s State Board of Elections is controlled today by election deniers and has been adopting new last-minute election rules with no plausible justification other than to tilt the state for Trump.
The Georgia Board recently adopted a rule requiring counties to hand count the ballots cast in the state to determine whether the number of paper ballots matches the voting machine count. While small rural counties may be able to comply with this burdensome last-minute requirement, large urban areas, which favor Democrats, don’t have the capacity to do this kind of paper ballot counting. Nor is it necessary.
The conservative Republican attorney general warned that the rule is likely unlawful. The rule is expected to be challenged in court.
This ballot-counting rule follows another rule by the Georgia Board that requires counties to make “reasonable inquiries” into the balloting before certifying the results, another rule subject to abuse by election deniers seeking to obstruct certification. This rule is being challenged in court.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi, a ridiculous challenge has been made in federal court to a rule—similar to one in place in 20 states—that allows a state to count mailed-in ballots received up to five days after Election Day if the ballot is postmarked by Election Day. This challenge, with national implications, was argued Tuesday before a conservative three-judge panel.
Election deniers are preparing to try to elect Trump at all costs, no matter who the voters choose. An all hands-on-deck legal effort will be required to stop this from happening.
Fortunately, that effort is underway.
That effort is being led by former U.S. Solicitors General Seth Waxman and Donald Verrilli Jr., two of the nation’s premier Supreme Court and appellate advocates. Also leading the effort are Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, with Covington and Burling; Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel; and John Devany, a Partner at Perkins Coie. They and a team of dozens of lawyers are representing Vice President Kamala Harris and the DNC.
Waxman and Verrilli, along with a third former U.S. solicitor general, the late Walter Dellinger, led the successful defense of the 2020 presidential election results, which included overwhelming victories against the dozens of baseless efforts by Trump and his supporters to try to overturn the Biden victory.
We can be confident that the supremely skilled and talented Waxman and Verrilli with their impressive history of major legal successes, and the team of dedicated colleagues, will protect our elections in the courts this election season.
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Analysis Shows Trump Loyalists Have 'Infiltrated' Election Boards in Key States
"With 102 deniers on election boards in the swing states, the potential for creating chaos is enormous."
Sep 13, 2024
More than 100 election officials across eight swing states in the U.S. presidential race have engaged in partisan election denial in recent years, raising fears they could try to turn the November result in favor of Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a report released Friday.
The 88-page report, produced by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), details the election denial history of 102 county and state election officials in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The authors found that election deniers have majority control of 15 county election boards in those states and of the statewide board in Georgia.
"What was striking to us about our research is how much election denialism and the voter fraud lie have infiltrated and taken over the Republican apparatus in each of these critical states," Arn Pearson, CMD's executive director, told The Guardian.
"With 102 deniers on election boards in the swing states, the potential for creating chaos is enormous," Pearson added.
The three Republicans on the five-member Georgia state election board support Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged. Last month, they changed the rules so that they'd have more power to refuse or delay certifying election results while conducting unspecified investigations, and they appear to be preparing more rules changes before November 5.
Trump recently commended the three Republicans by name at a rally in Atlanta, saying they were "on fire" and were "pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory."
In 2020, Trump lost to President Joe Biden, a Democrat, by only about 12,000 votes in Georgia, one of the states expected to be closely contested again this year as the Republican former president faces off against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
Trump faces criminal charges in Georgia for trying to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Four other defendants in the felony racketeering case have already pleaded guilty.
Marc Elias, an election lawyer who advises the Harris campaign, said the new rules in Georgia were "somewhere between insidious and insane." He and many other experts have emphasized that election boards are not meant to carry such power. Making a football analogy, Elias said that the rules gave "the scoreboard operator the opportunity to investigate for themselves whether a touchdown was scored," as he told The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Partisan conspiracy theories among election officials go well beyond Georgia, the CMD report shows. Pennsylvania has 29 election administration officials loyal to Trump—the most of any of the eight states—and they control the boards in seven counties there, the report says.
The report looks not just at election officials but also other Republican "election deniers" including U.S. congressional candidates and party officials from the eight states. The authors found 239 election deniers including the 102 election board officials.
CMD defined someone as an "election denier" if they had done any of the following: "denying that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election"; "espousing baseless claims or conspiracies about election and voter fraud during the 2020 election or subsequent elections"; "refusing to certify election results, or calling on others to refuse to certify, based on unfounded accusations of interference or fraud"; "expressing support for partisan or 'forensic' audits of 2020 election results"; "filing or expressing support for litigation aimed at overturning election results"; "participating in or supporting the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol or 'Stop the Steal' events."
Experts differ on whether Republican efforts to subvert the election, should Trump lose, will be more or less effective than in 2020.
"Our democracy's firewalls held fast in 2020, but election deniers and MAGA extremists have spent the last four years infiltrating election administration and political party positions in order to disrupt and cast doubt on the 2024 election results," Pearson said in a statement accompanying the report.
However, officials not loyal to Trump have also had more time to prepare for potential election interference, and the Electoral Count Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2022, could make it harder for Trump's efforts to succeed, experts say.
Pearson indicated that Trump's allies on election boards may not ultimately succeed at overturning the election but could sow doubt that damages democracy.
"While it is highly unlikely that these officials, along with deniers in Congress, will be able to prevent certification of the 2024 election results, they are in a prime position to force litigation and delay what should be a ministerial task while they and their allies whip up false claims of voter fraud, noncitizen voting, and a stolen election," he said.
CMD's report follows those of many other media outlets and watchdog groups in recent months, with broadly similar findings, if different exact figures. A CBS News investigation in May found 80 election-denying officials in seven battleground states. Rolling Stone and American Doom found nearly 70 in six states in July. And last month, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington issued a detailed report identifying 35 "rogue" officials.
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Is the US Ready to Defend Democracy From Rogue Election Officials?
In 2020, the election deniers were improvisational and slapdash; now they are systematic, organized, and well funded.
Aug 19, 2024
How precisely will election deniers try to undermine the results in 2024? Will we see a rerun of 2020’s parade of falsehoods—rigged voting machines, USB drives masquerading as breath mints, and bamboo-laced ballots from China? Or will they premiere some new tricks this election season? One answer has come into sharper focus in recent weeks. Will our system be ready? That remains to be seen.
We all learned in 2020 that we do not have one election, or even 50 state elections. Decisions are made by hundreds of county boards and officials. Usually that is routine. Just after voting takes place, poll workers and local election officials begin a rigorous, multistep process to accurately determine the results. This is all “ministerial.” Two plus two equals four. We have a winner! The voters vote, the results are tabulated, you affirm the numbers, and you go home.
All of which points to Georgia, where alarms are ringing. Rogue officials there are already preparing the ground to ignore voters in November.
Election deniers have quietly infiltrated county boards across the country. In Nevada, one official in the state’s second-largest county recently refused to certify her own election. Stop the steal!
You may remember former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rally at Georgia State University on August 3. That was the speech in which he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and, for good measure, Kemp’s wife. What was noteworthy, though, was the fellow Republicans he praised. He lauded three newly appointed members of the state election board. “They’re on fire. They are doing a great job,” he declared.
Three days later we learned why he was so effusive. The state officials announced a new rule to require county officials across Georgia to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before they can certify results.
That is a permission slip for subversion. In May, a board member who oversees elections in Fulton County—home of Atlanta, the biggest Black-majority city in the state—refused to certify a primary result, and to press her case, she sued her own election board. It turned out she is an organizer for Cleta Mitchell, a participant in Trump’s notorious “I just want to find 11,780 votes” phone call to Raffensperger in January 2021.
Indeed, election deniers have quietly infiltrated county boards across the country. In Nevada, one official in the state’s second-largest county recently refused to certify her own election. Stop the steal!
Even before the new Georgia rule went into effect, the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups went to court to support advocates working to protect the vote in Fulton County. We represent the Georgia NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Georgia.
That’s the thing: When a county official refuses to certify the votes because of... vibes, it’s not just antidemocratic. It’s unlawful. The Georgia Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that local officials don’t have a choice.
And for good reason. In the rough-and-tumble early years of our republic, elections were messy, and it was not uncommon for rogue local officials to interfere with certification to benefit their preferred candidate. Early American state courts and legislatures took notice. As my colleague Lauren Miller Karalunas explains in a widely cited law review article, they shaped election certification into a mandatory duty precisely so that officials like those in Fulton County couldn’t take election results into their own hands. In the prescient words of the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1909, allowing local certifying officials to reopen election returns and investigate the election itself “would afford temptation and great opportunity for the commission of fraud.”
In 2020, the election deniers were improvisational and slapdash. Now they are systematic, organized, and well funded. Trump already falsely claims that millions of noncitizens are preparing to vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) asserts that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But,” he admits, “it’s not been something that is easily provable.” The House passed legislation purportedly cracking down on the nonexistent plague of noncitizen voting. All of this creates an atmosphere of suspicion and panic—the very vibes that can be exploited by unscrupulous officials to delay certification and derail the vote.
At his Georgia State rally, Trump praised the election officials as “pit bulls” who sought “victory.” It will be up to courts to stand up for something other than “victory”—democracy, fairness, and the rule of law.
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Watchdog Finds 35 'Rogue' Election Officials Still in Position to Deny Results in 2024
"I think there's almost no question that this is going to happen," an expert said of county official obstructionism in 2024. "And it seems to be happening in a way this year that is more systematic than it has been in the past."
Aug 13, 2024
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, released a report on Monday showing that 35 county officials around the country who've previously tried to subvert election results are still in place to do so.
The 113-page report not only identifies "rogue" election officials who pose a risk of obstructing the certification process in order to help Republican nominee Donald Trump but also includes state-by-state and federal election law analysis meant to help thwart such obstructionism. CREW's state-level analysis covers eight key swing states.
CREW warned that county officials in the eight states—Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—have refused to certify results in elections of relatively little consequence as a test run for obstructing the consequential 2024 election, in case they dislike the results.
"I think there's almost no question that this is going to happen," Noah Bookbinder, CREW's president, said of the obstructionism on The Rachel Maddow Show Monday night. "And it seems to be happening in a way this year that is more systematic than it has been in the past. So that's deeply, deeply concerning."
"The good news is it's clearly illegal in all of these states and there are steps that can be taken to effectively halt it," he said.
Since 2020, threats to election certification have only escalated, including in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
We broke down what can be done to protect the 2024 election in our new report: https://t.co/8tLK0D7aV3
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) August 13, 2024
The report makes it clear, as previous nonprofit research has done, that election certification is not optional or discretionary: it is a ministerial duty. The authors wrote:
It is not an opportunity for county officials to politically grandstand, lodge protest votes against election practices they dislike or investigate suspected voter fraud," the report says. "State laws provide robust mechanisms outside of the certification process—including recounts, audits, evidentiary hearings before state election boards, and election contests in court—to investigate suspected fraud and errors. These are the legally-designated avenues for resolving the rare cases where genuine problems arise in an election, not the certification process.
The authors also explained that certification is just one stage in a multi-step process and must be done in a timely fashion to avoid disruptions, which could feed conspiracy theories.
Many of the laws pertaining to the certification role of election officials date back to the turn of the 20th century, when they were passed in order to stop partisan election deniers of that era, the report says.
Democrats have been especially concerned about election obstructionism since 2020, when then-President Trump tried to subvert and discredit the presidential election results—making false claims about voter fraud—after his reelection bid failed. That effort culminated in a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the U.S. Congress was preparing to certify the results.
Many county officials around the country, presumably feeling they had license given Trump's rhetoric, also voted against or delayed certification in 2020, but their efforts were unsuccessful due to being outvoted or legally forced to certify.
However, Republicans intent on winning at all costs are more organized this year, and there's more emphasis on the county level, CREW warned.
"The legal ground game that was brought to bear against certifying the election in 2020 was junior varsity compared to what we are going to see this year," Joshua Matz, a lawyer on the board at CREW, told The Guardian. "There is now a much better organized, much more sophisticated, far better funded and far more intentional effort to thwart the smooth and steady certification of election results required by the law."
The CREW report includes information on each of the 35 rogue officials, including their names and their stated reasons for refusing to certify one or more elections; many of them are included on the list because they tried to obstruct elections in the past two years.
Some of the county officials who've refused to certify elections have given reasons that are "brazenly lawless," the report says. In North Carolina, two officials voted against certification as a form of protest, and in Arizona two officials voted to delay certification as a "political statement." In other cases, in Georgia and Pennsylvania, obstructionist officials have offered a "veneer" of legal justification, the report says.
Very few county officials have faced legal consequences for their efforts to subvert the election process.
The CREW authors argued that the federal government needs to be ready to step in to enforce the Voting Rights Act and other laws.
"Because the states administer elections, they are the first lines of defense against county-level certification subversion," the report says. "But the federal government also has a vital role in enforcing relevant federal statutes and constitutional provisions protecting the right to vote. Thus, if a state is unable or unwilling to take action against rogue county officials who threaten to disenfranchise voters in violation of federal law, the U.S. Department of Justice should intervene."
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