The United States Republican Party has undertaken a broad range of efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election so that its candidate, Donald Trump, might win. The efforts come amidst a larger election denial movement among Republicans in the United States.
These efforts include searching for and exploiting vulnerabilities in the election system; challenging registrations, ballots and the certifications of results; flooding the election system and courts with allegations of fraud; baselessly alleging large-scale unlawful voting by undocumented migrants; and monitoring polling places in Democratic Party stronghold districts on the baseless premise of voting fraud. The Republican strategy involves first persuading voters that the election is about to be stolen by Democrats, despite lacking evidence.
Republicans have for decades sought evidence of what they allege is rampant voting fraud.[1] Multiple studies during this time have found that election fraud is extremely rare.[2][3] An election fraud database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation showed in 2024 evidence of just 1,513 instances of fraud over the preceding 42 years, though many of those instances have been challenged as dubious.[4][5] After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential 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.[6]
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."[7]
As president, Trump falsely claimed that millions of undocumented migrants illegally voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, depriving him of the popular vote victory.[8][9] As a result, Trump established an election integrity commission in May 2017, but 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.[10] 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. Critics said the commission's intent was to disenfranchise or deter legal voters.[11][12] Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions.[13][14] The commission did not find a single instance of a noncitizen voting.[15]
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.[16][17][18] 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.[19]
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.[20] Those indicted included Trump and several of his close associates, including Christina Bobb who leads the Republican National Committee "election integrity" legal efforts in the 2024 presidential election.[21]
During the 2024 campaign, Trump often referred to "election integrity" to allude to his continuing lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, as well as predictions of future mass election fraud. As he did during the 2020 election cycle, without evidence Trump told supporters that Democrats might try to rig the 2024 election. Many Republicans believe a conspiracy theory claiming Democrats engage in systematic election fraud to steal elections, insisting election integrity is a major concern, though voting fraud is extremely rare. By 2022, Republican politicians, conservative cable news outlets and talk radio echoed a narrative of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon that "if Democrats don't cheat, they don't win."[23]
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 a potential second Trump presidency. In July 2024, Mike Powell, the group's executive director for its Oversight Project said, "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, "this is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence."[24][25][26][27]
The Heritage Oversight Project also 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, "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.[28]
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 involves first persuading voters that the election is about to be stolen by Democrats, despite lacking evidence. After the election, if Trump loses, lawyers would attempt to challenge decades of settled law as to how elections are certified. The Times reported the efforts had "been quietly playing out in courts, statehouses and county boards for months, and is concentrated in critical battlegrounds."[29]
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.[30][31][32][33]
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.[34]
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 House. 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. 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."[35][36][37][38][39]
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."[40][41]
Republican elections activist Cleta Mitchell has 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.[42] 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, is heard to tell others that the RNC would support efforts to provide staff, organization and "muscle" in key states.[43][44]
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.[45][46][47] 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.[48][49] The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law has called EagleAI "a vehicle to disenfranchise voters and spread disinformation."[50]
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.[51][52]
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 had a pending lawsuit, backed by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, 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.[53][54][55]
In August 2024, the Trump-aligned majority of the Georgia 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.[56]
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 Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules that falsely alleged a five-state Democratic voting fraud operation in 2020. In response to a state lawsuit, in February 2024 True the Vote admitted in a 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, though Phillips said an updated version was rolling out that has close to "100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States." 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.[57][58][59][60][61][62]
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.[63][64]
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.[65] An April 2024 Cato Institute review of the Heritage Foundation election fraud database found just 85 irregularities involving noncitizens over the preceding 22 years.[66][67][68]
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 once 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.[69][70]
Politico reported in June 2022 that the Republican National Committee (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 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.[71]
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."[72]
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."[73] 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 to investigate 2020 election fraud allegations with an eye toward preventing future alleged fraud.[74] Such constitutional sheriffs organizations contend sheriffs are the supreme law enforcement authorities in the nation. The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified such groups as part of an "extreme antigovernment movement" associated with the American militia movement and the sovereign citizen movement.[75][76]
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."[77]
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, Catherine Englebrecht said, "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.[78][79]
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."[80][81]
As election workers faced threats and harassment, in February 2024 The Washington Post reported 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. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian 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."[82] A May 2024 Reuters/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."[83][84]
Trump has 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".[85]
Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, said in a speech in 1980: "I don't want everybody to vote ... our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Former President Donald J. Trump has baselessly and publicly cast doubt about the fairness of the 2024 election about once a day, on average, since he announced his candidacy for president, according to an analysis by The New York Times ... This rhetorical strategy — heads, I win; tails, you cheated — is a beloved one for Mr. Trump that predates even his time as a presidential candidate ... Long before announcing his candidacy, Mr. Trump and his supporters had been falsely claiming that President Biden was "weaponizing" the Justice Department to target him.
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. But Joe Hoft said after the Gateway Pundit event that instances in which officials didn't certify were "healthy". "We need to have people with courage to stand up in our next election and say, "No I'm not gonna certify it. I don't care if you throw me in prison or threaten me, I'm not going to certify it," he said.
In Arizona and Pennsylvania as in most states, elections are run by county governments, which must then certify the results. The act was regarded as little more than a formality until the 2020 election. Since then, local Republican officials aligned with the election denier movement have occasionally tried to use their position to hold up certification. The tactic has become more widespread this year and earned encouragement from Republican candidates and right-wing media personalities.
In Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, two Republican supervisors who refused to certify the local vote totals said they had no doubt their own county's tally was accurate but were protesting the counts in other counties that gave Democratic candidates for governor, attorney general and secretary of state their victories.
When a Georgia court unsealed the grand jury report on the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the first name on its recommended indictments was predictable: President Donald Trump. It's the second name on the list that jumped out: Cleta Mitchell. The grand jury recommended charging Mitchell for soliciting election fraud, witness interference, making false statements, and a host of other offenses. As a Trump adviser and election attorney, Mitchell played a central role in the effort to stop the certification of the election in Georgia and beyond. She was one of the principal players on the infamous call in which Trump implored Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find the 11,780 votes he needed to claim victory
As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.
The whole thing started with a few tweets by Gregg Phillips, a self-described conservative voter fraud specialist, who started making claims even before data on voter history was actually available in most jurisdictions.
The Heritage Foundation's much-cited database of voting irregularities, when recently checked, included about 85 cases involving noncitizens since 2002.
President Joe Biden has "welcomed millions and millions of illegal aliens" and "the millions that have been paroled can simply go to their local welfare office or the DMV and register to vote," Johnson said.
As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.