Get ready for Stop the Steal 2.0 — Republican supporters of former President Trump are gearing up for a fresh effort to undermine the vote count in 2024 if he loses to Democrat Kamala Harris.
In some battleground states, notably Georgia, MAGA extremists are pushing for new rules that could permit them to delay ballot counts or even invalidate votes from Democratic-leaning areas.
The GOP also has a larger and better prepared army of election lawyers ready to spring into action after the Nov. 5 vote in hopes of outdoing their failure to legally challenge Trump’s loss to President Biden four years ago.
With polls predicting a near dead heat between Trump and Harris, the White House battle is again likely to come down to a relative handful of votes in the seven battleground states.
If Trump trails in those states, he has already signaled that he will seek to undermine the vote counts like he did in 2020.
Democrats say they are confident that election officials in both red and blue states will do a fair and accurate job of counting the votes.
In five of the seven battleground states, the secretaries of state are Democrats. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who feuded with Trump in 2020 over his efforts to overturn his loss in the Peach state, is the top election official.
That leaves Nevada as the one pivotal swing state where a pro-Trump Republican is in charge of overseeing the vote count.
Still, Trump’s backers are pushing hard for new rules that critics say could lead to potential chaos on and after Election Day, confusion that Trump would likely harness as evidence to claim he is the real winner of the election even if he is trailing in key states, like in 2020.
In Georgia, the Republican majority on the state board of canvassers passed a new rule requiring counties, some of which include millions of voters, to hand count ballots. A judge is mulling a challenge to that rule, which Democrats say could be used to delay certification of vote tallies or even toss votes from some counties if Trump allies suspect fraud.
Some Republican-dominated counties have sought to implement hand counts even though experts say they are expensive and prone to human error.
Arizona’s deep-red Mohave County recently narrowly rejected a plan to hand count votes in November while rural Cochise County had to abandon a hand count amid legal challenges in 2022. An effort in Nye County, Nevada, ran into similar problems.
Republicans have also raised outlandish claims about large numbers of undocumented immigrants voting in the 2024 elections.
At Trump’s behest, congressional Republicans pushed a new law that would have required states to require anyone registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship, like a passport or U.S. birth certificate. They dropped the effort after Democrats called it an effort to make it harder for Americans to vote.
There’s also a renewed threat of violence against election officials sparked in large part by Trump’s fiery rhetoric denouncing election officials as part of a wide-ranging Deep State plot to deny him victory.
Across the country, local election directors are beefing up security in advance of Election Day to keep their workers and polling places safe while also ensuring that ballots and voting procedures won’t be tampered with.
Election offices and those who run them have been targets of harassment and even death threats since the 2020 presidential election, primarily by people acting on former Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him through widespread fraud or rigged voting machines.