Republican Party efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election

Republican Party's efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election involve a series of coordinated actions intended to influence election outcomes at both federal and state levels. These efforts, which were preceded by Republican efforts to restrict voting following the 2020 presidential election, are characterized by legislative, legal, and administrative strategies that sought to affect voter access, election oversight, and post-election certification processes. This initiative grew out of widespread claims within certain Republican Party circles about election integrity, many of which trace back to the 2020 United States presidential election and Trump's false claims of a stolen election, including the election denial movement in the United States, despite a lack of substantial evidence supporting these allegations.

Key elements of these strategies include attempts to modify voting laws, with a focus on restrictions that could disproportionately impact demographics more likely to vote for the Democratic Party. Additionally, Republican-led states saw a push to place partisan figures in election oversight positions, which may influence how election laws are interpreted and enforced. There is also a significant legal component, with numerous court cases challenging aspects of the voting process and aiming to set precedents for handling election disputes. These efforts sparked intense debate across the political spectrum, with proponents arguing that the measures "are necessary to ensure election security", while critics contend that they could undermine democratic processes by restricting voter access and eroding public trust in election fairness.

Background

For decades, Republicans sought evidence of what they allege is rampant voting fraud in the United States. Multiple studies during this time found that election fraud is extremely rare. An election fraud database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation showed in 2024 evidence of 1,513 instances of fraud over the preceding 42 years, although many of those instances have been challenged as dubious. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he falsely asserted the election had been rigged and stolen from him; the false allegations came to be known as his big lie. Many of his followers developed an election denial movement to advance this false narrative. As of August 2023, a large majority of Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents continued to believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.

In a 1980 speech, conservative Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich said, "I don't want everybody to vote ... our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." As president, Trump falsely claimed that millions of undocumented migrants illegally voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election, depriving him of the popular vote victory. As a result, Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017; the commission was disbanded several months later, with member Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, writing to commission chair Mike Pence and vice chair Kris Kobach that, contrary to public statements by Trump and Kobach, the commission did not find "substantial" voter fraud. Dunlap alleged the true purpose of the commission was to create a pretext to pave the way for policy changes designed to undermine the right to vote in the United States. Critics said the commission's intent was to disenfranchise or deter legal voters. Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions. The commission did not find a single instance of a noncitizen voting.

Conservative news outlets, such as Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN promoted false election fraud allegations during the weeks following the 2020 election, including conspiracy theories that voting machines had been rigged to favor Biden. Voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic filed defamation lawsuits against those three cable networks, some of their employees and others. Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement to Dominion in April 2023 after it was revealed that top on-air personalities and executives knew the allegations were false but continued to promote them anyway. The 2022 Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules falsely alleged that Democratic Party operatives engaged in an illegal ballot harvesting operation across five swing states during the 2020 election.

By April 2024, dozens of Republicans in four states were under indictment for their alleged involvement in the Trump fake electors plot and related Pence Card conspiracy, parts of wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Those indicted included Trump and several of his close associates, including Christina Bobb who leads the Republican National Committee (RNC) election integrity legal efforts in the 2024 presidential election. In September 2024, Hanna Rosin published an article about the aftermath of the January 6 attack in the lives of the insurrectionists, which mentions how they have created "a new mythology on the right", which could lead to a new attempt at overturning the election should Trump lose it. The Justice Department planned to monitor compliance with voting rights laws on Election Day in 27 states.

Activities

Allegations of rigged elections

To sow election doubt, Trump escalated use of "rigged election" and "election interference" statements in advance of the 2024 election compared to the previous two elections—the statements described as part of a "heads I win; tails you cheated" rhetorical strategy.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump often referred to "election integrity" to allude to his continuing claim that the 2020 election was rigged, as well as predictions of future mass election fraud. As he did during the 2020 election cycle, Trump claimed that Democrats would try to rig the 2024 election. Many Republicans reported to believe that Democratic Party have and continue to engage in systemic election fraud, with some being concerned regarding election integrity. By 2022, Republican politicians and conservative talk radio cable news outlets echoed the statement of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon that "if Democrats don't cheat, they don't win".

The Heritage Foundation has been closely aligned with the Republican Party since its founding in 1973 and in 2023 published Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump's second presidency. In July 2024, Mike Powell, the group's executive director for its Oversight Project, said that "as things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America", adding, "I'm formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election." Heritage released a report predicting without supporting evidence that Biden might try to retain power "by force" if he were to lose in November. Election law expert Rick Hasen remarked that "this is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence."

The Heritage Oversight Project produced videos for distribution on social media and conservative media outlets that made false or misleading claims about the extent of noncitizen voting registrations. In one video that was sent viral by an Elon Musk repost, Heritage falsely claimed that 14% of noncitizens in Georgia were registered, concluding that "the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy". Heritage based their findings on an extrapolation of hidden camera interview responses from seven residents in a Norcross, Georgia, apartment complex. State investigators found the seven people had never registered. During the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump's campaign and its allies revived allegations from 2020 that voting machines were rigged. The claims were widespread on social media and were frequently mentioned in lawsuits filed by Republicans. Trump and Musk repeated baseless claims of fraud and "cheating" in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the days before Election Day.

Seeking vulnerabilities in the election system

The New York Times reported in July 2024 that "the Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system" by systematically searching for vulnerabilities. The effort involves a network of powerful Republican lawyers and activists, many of whom were involved in the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It involves restricting voting and short-circuiting the certification process should Trump lose. The Republican strategy involved first persuading voters that the election is about to be stolen by Democrats, despite lacking evidence. After the election, if Trump were to lose, lawyers would attempt to challenge decades of settled law as to how elections are certified. The New York Times reported the efforts had "been quietly playing out in courts, statehouses and county boards for months, and is concentrated in critical battlegrounds". In October 2024, The Washington Post identified as vulnerabilities leading to a possible attempt at overturning the election's results the following: widespread false information, weeks-long recounts, lawsuits delaying final results, breakdown in certifying results, disruptions at elector meetings, Congress stalling the certification, and a wild card ("something new could be tried that attorneys and election officials haven’t yet gamed out").

Nebraska is one of two states that does not have a winner-take-all system of awarding electoral college votes but rather allocates the votes by its three congressional districts. One district contains the Omaha metro area, which can tend to lean Democrat (Obama won the district in 2008, as did Biden in 2020), while the other two are more rural and vote solid Republican. During 2024, some Nebraska Republicans sought to change the state's 1991 law that created its electoral college allocation system to winner-take-all and remove the likely elector for Kamala Harris. The proposal was blocked by Republican state senators; by September 2024, it was revived with pressure brought by Trump, all of the state's Republican representatives, and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.

During the 2024 Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump revealed that he and House Speaker Mike Johnson had a "little secret", stating: "I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over." Johnson confirmed the existence of the plan. Commentators speculated that they were referring to a contingent election, in which the United States House of Representatives elects the president; or a plot to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors in states that Trump would lose to not certify the results or submit slates of electors before the deadline, reducing the number of electors needed to win the electoral college vote.

Breaching and attempted breaching of voter machines

At an August 2021 event organized by Mike Lindell, copies of software from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Colorado and Michigan were distributed and posted to the public Internet. Election security experts warned that the release undermines trust in election security and allows for hackers to conduct vulnerability assessments, counter defenses, "sabotage the system, alter ballot design or even try to change results". Three vendors dominate election technology in the United States, limiting the ability for election officials to replace an existing system. Mike Lindell stated that his goal is to remove voting machines entirely and switch to paper ballots, a process that election officials warned would be tedious, time-consuming and prone to errors.

In text messages to Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, which conducted the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit, Michael Flynn expressed a goal to "fundamentally change the way votes are counted at the state level".

In August 2023, Matthew DePerno, the former Republican nominee for the 2022 Michigan Attorney General election, and former Republican state representative Daire Rendon were charged with "undue possession of a voting machine, willfully damaging a voting machine and conspiracy". DePerno spread false claims about the 2020 United States presidential election.

Election denial activists had spread a password that they alleged to be used in Dominion voting machines in Georgia, including wearing the alleged password on t-shirts.

In December 2022, election experts sent a letter to the United States Department of Justice that described a "multi-state conspiracy to copy voting software" that was at least partially funded by notable Trump supporters such as Sidney Powell and asking for a federal investigation. In December 2023, a follow-up open letter from computer scientists, election security experts and voter advocacy organizations listed repeated attempts by allies of Donald Trump to access voting system software in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado, again calling for a federal investigation, noting that the software is used nationwide. At least one breach had also occurred in North Carolina. In at least four cases, election officials had to decertify or replace voting equipment. Voting experts expressed alarm over the breaches due to their breaking of the chain of custody over ballots and tabulators; as well as invasion of voter privacy.

Vulnerabilities from ES&S

Election Systems & Software (ES&S) was founded by Republicans, is owned by a private equity firm, McCarthy Group, and its investors are unknown as of December 2019. Chuck Hagel was chairman of a predecessor company to ES&S. As of October 2019, ES&S controls about 50% of the election system market of the United States; makes most of its money from long-term maintenance contracts; has filed lawsuits when it fails to win contracts or has them taken away; hired former election officials as lobbyists; donated to political campaigns and lobbied politicians; and threatened lawsuits against voting rights activists and security researchers. Various issues with ES&S systems have been reported since at least 2002, including missing votes, potential duplicate votes, poor calibration of touch screens leading to misinterpreted votes, names missing from voter rolls and outdated technology. Concerns have also been raised by Ron Wyden about the security of its supply chain, as many parts were made in China and the Philippines. ES&S claimed that they had worked with Idaho National Laboratory for vulnerability testing, but as of December 2019, those findings have not been made public. In August 2018, Kamala Harris, Mark Warner, Susan Collins and James Lankford sent a letter to ES&S asking about their stance on independent security research after the company dismissed and discouraged such research on their systems. After the 2016 election, Jill Stein alleged that ES&S machines were vulnerable to hacking and difficult to audit, points supported by researchers. Issues with ES&S machines have also been reported during elections in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

In January 2020, NBC News reported that election security experts found at least 35 voting machines that were connected to the Internet as of the summer of 2019. While ES&S, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic have all admitted to adding modems in some of their tabulators and scanners (for the purpose of quickly sharing unofficial election results), all of the voting machines that were accessible online were manufactured by ES&S and located in 11 states (including Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan) and Washington D.C. Some of these machines have been connected for months or possibly years at a time. Critical systems connected to the Internet via a firewall include vote tabulators and "the election-management system that is used in some counties to program voting machines before elections." Security vulnerabilities - including missing firewall security patches, outdated SFTP server software, remote-access software, outdated operating systems, exposed passwords, exposed data of registered voters, no logging of some events and hash verification issues (noting that the hash verification was performed by ES&S instead of its customers) - were also reported.

A December 2020 investigation by DCReport found that the 2020 re-elections of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins had all occurred in states where votes were primarily tabulated by ES&S, arguing that their wins were improbable due to low or close pre-election polls. In the case of McConnell, DCReport found large vote leads in counties that had typically voted for Democrats (including in counties in which he had not previously won); discrepancies related to split-ticket voting; and issues with Kentucky voter records. A further investigation by the same outlet later that month found that multiple ES&S executives and lobbyists are connected with Republican party politicians and election officials (such as Sandra Mortham, Marci Andino and the office of Brian Kemp); that Chris Wlaschin, the former chief information security official at the United States Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration, had joined ES&S to lead their security team; that 40 out of 50 states partially use ES&S for casting and counting votes; and that during the 2020 election, all but three of the 25 states that Trump had won had partially or fully used ES&S voting machines. A 2021 article also noted that several Republican officials had refused to purchase equipment from Dominion due to false claims of fraud during the 2020 United States presidential election, alleging that ES&S would benefit by increasing its market share.

Challenging registrations, ballots and certifications

Following Trump's 2020 loss amid his false allegations of fraud, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive in several states across the country and to take control of the administrative management of elections at the state and local level. By 2023, organizations funded by dark money had met quietly with officials in Republican-controlled states to create an incubator of policies that would restrict ballot access and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in elections. Led by the Heritage Foundation, the groups include the Honest Elections Project, which is among a network of conservative organizations associated with Leonard Leo, a longtime prominent figure in the Federalist Society.

The Washington Post reported in June 2024 on indications that county-level Republicans in swing states might be preparing to challenge and delay their certifications of voting results in 2024. Such delays might cause a state to miss deadlines that ensure its electoral college votes are counted in Washington on January 6, 2025. In four state elections since 2020, county election officials withheld certifications, citing mistrust in voting machines or ballot errors, though they could not produce evidence of actual voting fraud; the certifications proceeded after state interventions, which included warnings of potential criminal charges. Two Cochise County, Arizona, officials were criminally charged for refusing to certify, not because of doubts about Cochise results but as a protest against other counties voting for Democratic state candidates. Project Democracy found that since 2020 members of state and local election boards had voted against certification more than twenty times in eight states. Voting rights activists were concerned that the continuing false allegations of election fraud since 2020 might lead to social unrest if efforts to delay certifications at the local level were overruled by state officials or courts. The failure of a state to have its electoral college votes counted on January 6 could result in neither presidential candidate reaching the minimum 270 electoral votes, causing the election to be thrown to the United States House of Representatives. In that scenario, the election outcome would be determined by a simple majority count of state delegations; Republicans hold a majority in 28 of 50 delegations in the 118th United States Congress and thus Trump would win in such a scenario. The Guardian confirmed that "experts have been particularly alarmed by efforts to try and halt certification at the local level – something that could cause delay and chaos after the presidential vote in November."

Cleta Mitchell speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference

Republican elections activist Cleta Mitchell said "the only way [Democrats] win is to cheat". She was a key figure in Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, participating in the January 2021 Trump–Raffensperger phone call that attempted to change the certified 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. That year, in association with the RNC, she launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) to recruit, train and deploy election deniers as poll workers in eight key states for the 2024 presidential election. In recordings of spring 2022 organizing meetings obtained by Politico, RNC National Election Integrity director Josh Findlay, referencing EIN, was heard to tell others that the RNC would support efforts to provide staff, organization, and "muscle" in key states. The New York Times reported that the EIN "has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump's falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action". Gaining access to over 400 hours of Zoom meetings, The New York Times reported that EIN had closely coordinated with the RNC, four Republican secretaries of state, and a dozen state legislatures. The group was funded by multiple Republican megadonors associated with Trump, and had successfully spread conspiracy theories about voting with several right-wing media outlets and had installed activists on election boards and thousands as poll monitors and workers. EIN has also been collaborating with other groups to challenge voter rolls, including VoteRef (run by Gina Swoboda and funded by Restoration PAC, a Super PAC predominantly funded by Richard Uihlein) and Check My Vote. The Pennsylvania Department of State described these voter registration challenges as "an attempt to circumvent the list maintenance processes that are carefully prescribed by state and federal law," which would result in "disenfranchisement, unnecessary litigation, and a harassing diversion of already-stretched county resources."

The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a bipartisan nonprofit that helps elections officials in some 30 states manage their registration rolls with the use of software to maintain election integrity. In 2022, ERIC faced criticism from election deniers and right-wing media after the far-right blog The Gateway Pundit published a series of stories falsely suggesting it is part of a left-wing election conspiracy funded by George Soros to register Democrats. Several Republican-controlled states soon severed their association with ERIC. Members of the EIN had lobbied to have the system removed, and their activism was publicized by The Gateway Pundit and other right-wing media outlets. To supplant ERIC, Mitchell led an effort to deploy the EagleAI NETwork election software in the 2024 presidential election. NBC News reported in August 2023 that "election experts and voting rights advocates warn that an activist-led strategy risks overwhelming election workers with reports of problem registrations generated by amateurs using unreliable data. And those reports may, in turn, intimidate voters or require them to jump through hoops to maintain their voting rights." After months of testing, by July 2024 some conservative activists found the EagleAI system was unreliable. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law called EagleAI "a vehicle to disenfranchise voters and spread disinformation". The Associated Press reported in June 2024 that EagleAI "is funded and used by supporters of Trump, some of whom worked to overturn the 2020 vote, and entwined with the Republican's campaign." AP reported EagleAI was pursuing deployment in several states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada and Ohio. During an internal meeting about the system, Cleta Mitchell said, "The left will hate this — hate this. But we love it." Despite its name, the software does not employ artificial intelligence, and though it is pronounced "eagle eye", its creator denied it was named after Operation Eagle Eye, a 1960s Republican Party voter suppression effort. As of July 2024, at least one county in Georgia signed a contract to use EagleAI for voter roll maintenance.

EagleAI is funded by Ziklag, an American Christian organization which includes the Uihlein family and whose goals include as part of "Operation Checkmate": "[securing] 10,640 additional unique votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and [removing] up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.". Citizen AG, a group self-described as part of Operation Checkmate, announced its intention to file lawsuits against counties that do not accept voter challenges from EagleAI. Ziklag also funded an effort by the American Legislative Exchange Council to share talking points about "election integrity" with Republican party state lawmakers in 2022.

Julie Adams, an EIN regional coordinator, sits on the Fulton County, Georgia, elections board and has promoted the use of EagleAI in Georgia. In May 2024, she abstained from certifying the recent county primary results, though no issues of error or misconduct had been raised. State law says that election boards "shall" certify elections if no problems were identified; the four other board members voted to certify. Adams started a lawsuit, backed by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI), seeking a court ruling to grant election board members more discretion in certifications. Congresswoman and Georgia Democratic Party chair Nikema Williams alleged that Adams was attempting to set the stage to block certification of results in the November presidential election. Fulton is the most populous county in Georgia with a plurality of Black residents. A Fulton County superior court judge ruled against Adams in October 2024, finding that her actions were unconstitutional and violated state law. The legal arm of AFPI was led by former Florida attorney general and Trump attorney Pam Bondi who filed voting lawsuits in battleground states.

In August 2024, the Trump-aligned majority of the Georgia State Election Board approved a new rule allowing county election boards, before certifying their election results, to conduct a "reasonable inquiry" to verify the results are "a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election"; another vote days later required that county election officials be given "all election related documentation" before certification. Opponents asserted the new rules violated state law and more than a century of state court precedent, and might lead to post-election delays or rejections of certifications in an important swing state. During a campaign rally three days before the board vote, Trump called out by name the three board members who later approved the rule, describing them as "pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory". One of them was in the rally audience and stood for recognition of Trump's praise. On August 26, Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he had asked Republican Georgia attorney general Chris Carr if the governor had the authority to remove election board members, citing ethics concerns expressed by some. That same day, national and state Democrats filed a suit alleging the rules changes were illegal and would create chaos. The board majority also approved a rule in September requiring all counties to hand-count their ballots for comparison to machine counts, which critics said might cause errors and confusion while also disrupting the custody of ballots, which typically remain sealed unless a recount is demanded in a challenged election. The recounts could also significantly delay the reporting of election results. In October 2024, a Fulton County superior court judge temporarily blocked the board's hand counting rule, finding it was "too much, too late" to implement in the 2024 election. The next day, another Fulton County superior court judge found that seven new rules established by the State Election Board were "illegal, unconstitutional and void", ordering the Georgia State Election Board to inform all state and local election officials that the rules were to be disregarded. An appeal of the latter ruling by the RNC was unanimously rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court days later.

Catherine Engelbrecht

After joining the Tea Party movement of the Republican Party, Catherine Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, seeking to expose voting fraud. The organization has long promoted debunked election fraud theories. She and her collaborator Gregg Phillips provided the source information for the 2022 D'Souza film 2000 Mules that falsely alleged a five-state Democratic voting fraud operation in 2020. In response to a state lawsuit, True the Vote admitted in a February 2024 court filing that it had no evidence to support its voting fraud claims in Georgia. Phillips originated the false allegation that millions of noncitizens voted in the 2016 presidential election. For the 2024 election, they introduced IV3, a software program which they claim compares U.S. Postal Service information to voter rolls so that anyone can challenge registrations. A Wired examination found the system unreliable, although Phillips said an updated version was rolling out that has close to "100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States". According to Catherine Engelbrecht, as of July 2024, IV3 has logged more than 700,000 challenges of voter registrations. As of April 2024, Gregg Phillips was also developing Ground Fusion, software "aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions." The America Project, founded in 2021 by Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, said it would roll out "state-of-the-art election tools" that would include artificial intelligence technology.

In 2024, True the Vote launched VoteAlert, a social media application that allows users to report examples of what they perceive to be voter fraud. Wired had criticized a test version of the app for promoting unfounded conspiracy theories about the election. An election worker from Riverside County, California that was using the app claimed to demand identification from voters that she perceived as non-citizens, a plot that Wired described as "racist and illegal". As of November 2024, election workers from the county were investigating the incident.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington obtained months of emails among elections officials in at least five Georgia counties calling themselves the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The Guardian reported the communications included a "who's who of Georgia election denialists" who were "coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November's election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement." Some officials had ties to national groups like Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network led by Cleta Mitchell. By October 2024, Republicans were filing lawsuits in battleground states alleging potential fraud to challenge mail-in ballots received from American citizens living abroad. They sought to have certain ballots set aside until voter eligibility could be verified. With about 6.5 million eligible American voters living overseas, including hundreds of thousands of military personnel, the overseas vote was long considered sacrosanct by both parties, historically giving Republicans a voting edge but more recently that advantage had diminished or swung to Democrats. Judges in Michigan and North Carolina rejected RNC suits, ruling they were an "attempt to disenfranchise" voters and had "presented no substantial evidence" of fraud. Republican congressman Scott Perry played a key role among Republican House members in efforts to overturn Biden's election in 2020. He and five other Pennsylvania representatives filed suit in their state asserting that verification of overseas ballots was insufficient to protect the election from foreign interference. Perry said he "joined my colleagues to defend our election against the intrusion and interference of the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world: Iran." Pennsylvania federal judge Christopher Conner dismissed the suit in October 2024, citing its "phantom fears of foreign malfeasance".

Election vigilante groups

The Election Integrity Act of 2021 in Georgia (SB 202) allows persons to file an unlimited number of challenges to voter registrations in the state. As of November 2022, at least 149,168 challenges have been filed, primarily against young or Black voters, and no charges of voter fraud have been made. These lists of challenges have been created by True the Vote, which claimed to partially obtain them from the National Change of Address registry. Brad Raffensperger stated that "though federal law restricts our ability to update our voter registration lists, the Elector Challenge is a vehicle under our law to ensure voter integrity." Bee Nguyen accused the law of bypassing the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which forbids voter registration purges 90 days prior to an election. SB 202 in turn potentially violates that federal law as well as the Civil Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act.

By July 2024, conservative groups were systematically challenging large numbers of voter registrations across the country. Many of these efforts were driven by lawsuits, including from the RNC, and activists calling themselves election investigators. The groups' stated rationale was to purge voter rolls of dead people, noncitizens and others ineligible to vote. Several Republican secretaries of state were also examining the rolls themselves. The executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors said many of the challenges ignore or misunderstand the complexity and legal requirements involved in maintaining the rolls. Others said the efforts risked disenfranchising eligible voters and sowing distrust in the election system. The Michigan secretary of state had earlier in the year directed a suburban Detroit clerk to reinstate about 1,000 registrations of eligible voters that had been purged. The New York Times reported "it is difficult to know precisely how many voters have been dropped from the rolls as a result of the campaign — and even harder to determine how many were dropped in error."

In October 2024, investigative journalist Greg Palast published to YouTube a documentary, Vigilantes Inc., detailing voter suppression by "vigilante" challenges by self-appointed vote-fraud hunters, not government officials, who are targeting people to challenge and block the counting of their ballots. Many challenges disproportionately impacted Blacks, students, immigrants, and lower income voters. Some of the vigilante challenge groups, such as Soles to the Rolls in Michigan or the Pigpen Project in Nevada, are connected to Cleta Mitchell, True the Vote, Mike Lindell or EagleAI. The Pigpen Project is ran by former Nevada GOP executive directors and endorsed by Paul Nehlen. The group is part of the Citizens Outreach Foundation, which attempted to purge 11,000 people from Washoe County, Nevada voter rolls in 2024, a move that the ACLU said violated state and federal law due to being requested within 90 days of the upcoming election. Other groups include the People's Audit, Look Ahead America (founded by a former Trump campaign staffer), Wisconsin's North of 29 (connected to Mike Lindell, and the founder's husband ran for Wisconsin State Assembly in 2024), Iowa Canvassing, Clean Elections USA (CEUSA), FEC United (founded by Joe Oltmann) and the Liberty Center for God and Country (run by Steven Hotze). In 2022, voting rights activists in Arizona filed a lawsuit against CEUSA, alleging that its vigilantes have engaged in voter intimidation by appearing with military gear, weapons and drones at polling locations and ballot drop boxes, as well as by taking pictures of people attempting to use drop boxes with the threat of posting them online. In at least one case, vigilantism over a false claim of voter fraud had led to violence.

As of August 2024, 40,000 vigilante activists from True the Vote had challenged 851,381 American voters in 43 states.

Allegations of noncitizens voting

See also: Electoral fraud in the United States § Noncitizen voting

A surge of migrants crossed the southern United States border beginning in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump and many of his allies alleged the Biden administration was intentionally welcoming migrants into the country so they could register and vote for Democratic candidates. Cleta Mitchell was instrumental in spreading this conspiracy theory nationwide by hosting Zoom calls advising volunteers to spread it. Many volunteers repeated rumors and conspiracies that NGOs aligned with Democrats were registering migrants to vote. Fox News host Maria Bartiromo told her X (formerly Twitter) followers that a friend of a friend told her they had seen tables set up outside Texas DMV offices to register migrants, though a Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman said "none of it is true". Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and organizations such as Tea Party Patriots and the Election Transparency Initiative, the latter led by former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, also advanced these false narratives. Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said during an August congressional hearing that he believed the false narratives were created "to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election this year. The Big Lie is being pre-deployed." Lies about noncitizen voting have become the main focus of election denialism ahead of the 2024 election, which some experts say have been used to intimidate and suppress voters while laying the groundwork to try and overturn the election again, should Trump lose.

The New York Times reported in September 2024 that "the notion that [noncitizens] will flood the polls — and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — is animating a sprawling network of Republicans who mobilized around" Trump after he claimed the 2020 election was rigged, and "the false theories about widespread noncitizen voting could be used to dispute the outcome again." The Heritage Foundation was particularly instrumental in spreading the false narrative. Appearing with Trump in April 2024, House speaker Mike Johnson baselessly suggested "potentially hundreds of thousands of votes" might be cast by undocumented migrants; as president, Trump falsely asserted that millions of votes cast by undocumented migrants had deprived him of a popular vote victory in the 2016 election. States have found very few noncitizens on their voting rolls, and in the extremely rare instances of votes cast by noncitizens, they are legal immigrants who are often mistaken that they have a right to vote. An April 2024 Cato Institute review of the Heritage Foundation election fraud database found 85 irregularities involving noncitizens over the preceding 22 years.

Elon Musk, owner of X, has used his account with 197 million followers to post false or misleading information about the election, notably the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, contending Democrats are intentionally "importing" undocumented migrants to vote. In one case, Musk reposted a false claim that as many as two million noncitizens had been registered to vote in three states. Analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that during the first seven months of 2024, fifty false or misleading Musk posts about the election generated 1.2 billion views; independent fact-checkers debunked the posts, though the Community Notes user-generated fact check feature on X did not note them. Musk endorsed Trump in July 2024.

Monitoring of polling places in Democratic districts

Politico reported in June 2022 that the RNC sought to deploy an "army" of poll workers and attorneys in swing states who could refer what they deemed questionable ballots in Democratic voting precincts to a network of friendly district attorneys to challenge. In April 2024, RNC co-chair Lara Trump said the party had the ability to install poll workers who could handle ballots, rather than merely observe polling places. She also said that the 2018 expiration of the 1982 consent decree (Ballot Security Task Force) prohibiting the RNC from intimidation of minority voters "gives us a great ability" in the election. Republicans were recruiting poll watchers in suburbs to deploy in urban areas dominated by Democratic voters. Critics said the RNC plans created a risk that election workers might face harassment and undermine trust in the election process. The Republican governors of several states said that they would not allow the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to send poll monitors to ensure that there are no civil rights violations at polling places.

Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union that hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), wrote election officials in at least three swing states in August 2024 to explain plans to monitor ballot drop boxes. Schlapp wrote the monitoring was intended to encourage rather than discourage voting. Election officials dismissed Schlapp's premise; Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes remarked, "the whole thing is an absurd sham to cover up direct efforts to intimidate voters by a bunch of CPAC-recruited vigilantes." True the Vote planned to team with sympathetic sheriffs to monitor polling places and drop boxes in Wisconsin. Catherine Engelbrecht said her group was "mainly focused" on Wisconsin but "we do have a scalable program". By 2022, True the Vote and others were seeking cooperation with "constitutional sheriffs" organizations such as Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association and Protect America Now (co-founded by sheriff Mark Lamb) to investigate 2020 election fraud allegations with an eye toward preventing future alleged fraud. Such constitutional sheriffs organizations contend sheriffs are the supreme law enforcement authorities in the nation. The Southern Poverty Law Center classified such groups as part of an "extreme antigovernment movement" associated with the American militia movement and the sovereign citizen movement.

Trump's political operation said in April 2024 that it planned to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers to polling places across battleground states, with an "election integrity hotline" for poll watchers and voters to report alleged voting irregularities. Trump told a rally audience in December 2023 that they needed to "guard the vote" in Democratic-run cities; at an August 2024 rally, he said he already had enough votes and "our primary focus is not to get out the vote, but to make sure they don't cheat". He had complained that his 2020 campaign was not adequately prepared to challenge his loss in courts; some critics said his 2024 election integrity effort is actually intended to gather allegations to overwhelm the election resolution process should he challenge the 2024 election results. Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer who defeated every Trump court challenge after the 2020 election, remarked, "I think they are going to have a massive voter suppression operation and it is going to involve very, very large numbers of people and very, very large numbers of lawyers."

The America Project founded by Flynn and Byrne is staffed by prominent election deniers and funds another project, One More Mission, that seeks to recruit tens of thousands of people with military and law enforcement experience to monitor polling places. The Intercept reported in April 2020 that during a February strategy session attended by conservative donors and activists, Englebrecht said that "you get some SEALs in those polls and they're going to say, 'No, no, this is what it says. This is how we're going to play this show.' That's what we need. We need people who are unafraid to call it like they see it." Several attendees specifically cited this need for "inner city" and predominantly Native American polling precincts. The National Fraternal Order of Police, representing some 375,000 police officers nationwide, endorsed Trump in September 2024. Addressing the group's board, he urged officers to "watch for voter fraud" because "you can keep it down just by watching, because, believe it or not, they're afraid of that badge." Such police activity might violate multiple state laws and raise concerns of voter intimidation. The next day, Trump posted on social media that, if he were to win, "those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country."

As election workers faced threats and harassment, The Washington Post reported in February 2024 it had interviewed more than a dozen election officials around the country who said they were "preparing for the types of disruptions that historically had been more associated with political unrest abroad than American elections". This included planning to quickly debunk misinformation, deescalate conflicts and improve coordination with federal, state, and local law enforcement to better respond to harassment, threats and potential violence. Fontes said his office was preparing for worst-case scenarios, saying "we recognize the real and present danger that’s presented by the conspiracy theories and the lies." A May 2024 poll by Reuters and Ipsos poll found some 68% of Americans — 83% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans — said they were concerned that political violence might follow the election. Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism aide to former vice president Mike Pence, remarked that "the potential for anger, division, political violence — all of that groundwork is being laid out again".

Ivan Raiklin, a close Michael Flynn associate, addressed an October 2024 Rod of Iron Ministries Freedom Festival, urging attendees to "confront" their state representatives with "evidence of the illegitimate steal" should Trump lose. He told attendees he was planning for a range of scenarios following the election, saying, "I have a plan and strategy for every single component of it. And then January 6 is going to be pretty fun." He added, "We run the elections. We try to play it fair. They steal it, our state legislatures are our final stop to guarantee a checkmate." Raiklin had previously characterized himself as Trump's "Secretary of Retribution" and said he had a prepared a "Deep State Target List' of over 350 people he would go after in a second Trump administration. Raiklin claims to have 80,000 recruits prepared to be deputized by constitutional sheriffs. Asked by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on October 13 whether he was "expecting chaos on Election Day" by "outside agitators" such as migrants or terrorists, Trump replied, "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within", referencing "radical left lunatics". He added, "It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen."

Challenging the legitimacy of Kamala Harris

See also: Withdrawal of Joe Biden from the 2024 United States presidential election

Trump repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of his opponent, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election by falsely claiming she orchestrated a "coup" against Biden in what The Washington Post described as an attempt to delegitimize Harris if she wins and undermine confidence in the result of the 2024 election. It further noted Trump's long insistence that "his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power", echoing right-wing conspiracy theories and rhetoric about a deep state in the United States.

Blue shift and use of polling to suggest victory

Further information: Blue shift (politics)

Trump pointed to the known voting phenomenon known as a "blue shift" or "red mirage" to make baseless allegations of voting fraud. Trump frequently made unfounded claims that he is ahead in the polls and winning in deep blue states such as California, alleging the only reason he loses such states is because of voter fraud. By October 2024, Trump made several rallies in blue states such as at Coachella, California and Madison Square Garden in New York, and CNN reported that Trump believes holding rallies in blue states helps "show how deep his support runs across the nation" and also "set the groundwork for Trump to question the election results should Harris win".

In October 2024, The New York Times reported on a number of polls commissioned by right-wing firms, most showing a Trump victory and standing out "amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election" and that they were seen as "building a narrative of unstoppable momentum for Mr. Trump". It further said that the polls were "cementing the idea that the only way Mr. Trump can lose to Vice President Kamala Harris is if the election is rigged" and that they "could be held up as evidence of cheating if that victory does not come to pass". The report noted that by October 2020, Republican-aligned pollsters had only released 15 presidential polls in swing states compared to 37 in 2024, and that of the 37 all but seven had Trump in the lead. Several of the polls were also accepted in influencing the polling averages by RealClearPolitics, which were widely shared among Republican circles. The New York Times also reported on betting markets Polymarket and Kalshi as strongly favoring Trump over Harris, and that part of the surge appeared in part due to a small number of individuals betting $30 million on a Trump win, and that Trump and Musk had pointed to the betting markets as evidence of their strength. Other data, including early-voting numbers were also "cited by Trump supporters as further evidence of his impending triumph".

Joshua Dyck of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell said that "Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger." The increase in partisan polls were criticized by Simon Rosenberg, who alleged that Republicans were "flooding the zone" to shift polling averages, create media buzz and deflate Democratic enthusiasm. G. Elliott Morris of FiveThirtyEight stated that such low-quality polls would not impact their polling averages, which are weighted by the quality and reputation of the pollster, as did Nate Cohn of The New York Times, who calculated only a small shift in the averages. Polling strategists for both parties criticized seeing the use of polling "weaponized" to decrease faith in the entire system. Republican strategist Mike Madrid stated that "the main reason you float data like that is because you're trying to convince your supporters there's no way Trump can lose — unless it's stolen".

Blocking federal election monitors

In early November 2024, the secretaries of state for Missouri, Florida, and Texas have stated their intention to block federal election monitors from accessing polling places on Election Day. The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has historically been responsible for enforcing federal voting rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Precinct strategy

Precinct strategy is a political strategy - advocated by Tea Party activist and Oath Keeper member Daniel J. Schultz, promoted by Mark Finchem, Steve Bannon, Turning Point Action and Michael Flynn, and endorsed by Donald Trump - for supporters of the election denial movement to join local level committees or become poll workers. Precinct officers collectively can affect the election process due to their ability to elect party officers, influence which candidates are on a ballot, and encourage voter turnout. In some states, they can also choose poll workers or members of election oversight boards. As of September 2021, at least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers or locally equivalent officials joined in counties across the United States, particularly ones that were seen as politically competitive. Not all district chairs screen their applicants. Some of the new officers openly supported the QAnon conspiracy theory and participated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Schultz had previously defended the American militia movement in an article and advocated for new officers to be armed with weapons, considering the precinct strategy to be the last alternative to violence. Once empowered, some officers have attempted to push out higher ranking officials who do not support false claims about the 2020 United States presidential election and elect those who do, with varying degrees of success. Christian right activists, alongside True the Vote and the Election Integrity Network, have also participated in efforts to recruit poll workers in swing states. By June 2022, this strategy was used by the Republican National Committee to connect new poll workers with local party attorneys. By April 2024, the Republican Party was largely controlled by the election denial movement, especially as several Trump campaign personnel took leadership roles in the RNC.

In September 2024, the Center for Media and Democracy released a report identifying 239 Republican election administrators, candidates and party leaders in swing states that were part of the election denial movement. In October 2024, the RNC and Trump campaign co-hosted a training event for poll workers in Wisconsin and across the United States. Republican officials refused to make training materials public, with the exception of the point that poll workers were encouraged to report perceived suspicions to state RNC lawyers.

Spreading false information and suppressing disinformation researchers

Several Republican Party politicians and operatives have ties to websites that have been considered by misinformation researchers and journalists to spread false information, especially about climate change, prejudice against marginalized groups, COVID-19 or the 2020 United States presidential election, including The Epoch Times, The Western Journal, and Breitbart. Some of these websites had lost advertisers in response to boycotts or were banned from being shared on some social media platforms such as Facebook or Google News, reducing their web traffic. Other conservative figures, most notably Donald Trump in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol attack, were deplatformed from social media for incitement of violence or hate speech. As such, "Republican politicians and activists have alleged that the tech companies are unfairly censoring the right, threatening conservatives' ability to sway public opinion and win elections."

In 2021, Republican legislators in Texas and Florida passed laws to limit the ability of social media organizations to moderate content on their own platforms. These laws were supported by Republican attorneys general from 19 states.

In 2022, under pressure from Republican politicians and right-wing activists, the United States Department of Homeland Security shut down the Disinformation Governance Board and canceled a project with a non-profit to track death threats targeting election workers.

Starting in 2023, academic and private researchers of disinformation have been subject to subpoenas, lawsuits and public records requests by the House Judiciary Committee (led by Jim Jordan) and America First Legal (led by Stephen Miller), respectively, "accusing them of colluding with the [United States federal] government to suppress conservative speech online." These efforts, described as an "attempt to chill research", have not produced evidence "that government officials coerced [social media platforms] to take action against accounts" as of June 2023. Lawsuits have also been filed against the federal government by the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire and The Federalist. Researchers had been subject to increased time demands, legal costs and online harassment. Subpoenas (including threats of contempt) were also sent to large technology companies by the committee, alleging that they had a liberal bias. These actions, combined with reduced content moderation by social media platforms and progress in generative artificial intelligence have occurred alongside an increase in online misinformation and disinformation.

By January 2024, researchers, technologists and political scientists warned that "disinformation [posed] an unprecedented threat to democracy in the United States in 2024." By June 2024, one of the research groups targeted by the committee, the Stanford Internet Observatory, had refocused its work and its Election Integrity Partnership project had ended. False information, including AI slop, conspiracy theories about the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, the Springfield pet-eating hoax and false claims about the 2024 United States elections had been spread online repeatedly by Republican politicians during the 2024 election cycle.

See also

• Foreign interference in the 2024 United States elections

Further reading

• "Republicans lay legal groundwork for election challenges" (September 29, 2024) by Reuters
• "Trump Allies Bombard the Courts, Setting Stage for Post-Election Fight" (September 29, 2024) by New York Times