How Trump Is Already Setting The Groundwork To Challenge The 2024 Election Results If He Loses

With a month and change to go before the election, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his allies are already laying the groundwork to contest the results of the 2024 election if he loses by engaging in a false campaign around the threat of noncitizen voting.

Trump and Republican leaders, from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to GOP secretaries of state who oversee elections, have pushed the narrative that the 2024 elections are being intentionally corrupted by mass noncitizen voting.

Noncitizen voting is “a clear and present danger,” Johnson claimed at a May press conference announcing federal legislation mandating proof of citizenship to register to vote.

In his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last month, Trump took things further, falsely claiming that Democrats allow immigrants into the country to get them to vote illegally.

“They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them into our country,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, GOP secretaries of state, including Ohio’s Frank LaRose and Alabama’s Wes Allen, and Texas’ GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, made headlines announcing purges of supposed noncitizens from their voter rolls. Texas has also mobilized law enforcement to crack down on voter registration activities by Latino activist groups, raiding their homes and intimidating them from engaging in politics.

This strategy has been led by Trump and his allies in Congress and around his campaign. It has been joined by high-profile conservative voices like billionaire Elon Musk and former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. And it has been organized by election deniers through the conservative election denial group Election Integrity Network, run by Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who backed Trump’s effort in 2020 to steal the election.

Now, with just weeks to go in the election, the noncitizen voting allegations have entered the courts. Beginning in August, the Republican Party, a Trump-allied legal nonprofit run by his adviser, Stephen Miller, and a grassroots election denial group filed a string of lawsuits seeking massive purges of voters they claim to be either noncitizens or otherwise illegitimately registered to vote while suggesting that elections cannot be certified if they don’t get their way.

These lawsuits are not only riddled with unsubstantiated claims of noncitizen voting and faulty data analysis claiming mass voter fraud — they all seek a remedy that is illegal. Federal law prohibits election officials from removing registered voters from the rolls within a 90-day blackout period prior to an election, a period that began on Aug. 7. Courts cannot order voter purges after that date.

These lawsuits could have been filed earlier in 2024, when a court could order officials to review voters’ citizenship status or other potential registration errors and remove them from the rolls. But the groups filing these suits all waited until this remedy was impossible. Instead, these lawsuits appear to be part of a concerted public relations campaign to cast doubt on the outcome of the election if Trump loses again, as well as provide a post-election justification to local officials to refuse to certify the vote.

“They are pre-deploying a big lie to justify their future efforts to disrupt or overturn elections,” said Wendy Weiser, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights group, who is involved in challenging these lawsuits.

The Lie

In 2020, Trump and the Republican Party pointed to election law changes enacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic that made it easier for voters to cast their ballots without appearing in person to claim President Joe Biden’s win was fraudulent. Trump’s “big lie” caused a chaotic rush following the election as he sought to toss out the valid votes of millions of Americans, culminating in the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s second impeachment and his indictment on multiple felony counts.

Trump continues to embrace the lies about 2020, and Republicans have largely followed suit. More of them trust Trump’s word over government certification of election results, according to an Associated Press poll conducted this year.

With no pandemic voting changes to rely on, Republicans are now hanging their hat on the issue of noncitizen voting to provide the narrative structure for false post-election fraud claims.

Of course, like the lies around voting in 2020, Republicans’ claims of mass noncitizen voting are entirely made up. Noncitizen voting is already illegal in all federal and state elections under multiple laws. It is also vanishingly rare.

A database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has been promoting falsehoods about noncitizen voting, lists just 68 legal actions taken against noncitizens for voting in federal elections going back to the 1980s. Meanwhile, a study by the progressive Brennan Center found that election officials across 42 jurisdictions in 12 states found just 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting following the 2016 election. For perspective, that accounts for 0.0001% of the votes cast in those jurisdictions. Even Trump’s own election fraud task force failed to find any evidence of systematic or widespread fraud, including involving noncitizens in elections.

Republicans even acknowledge that their claims are unproven but instead cling to the falsehood of mass noncitizen voting as an article of faith.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Johnson said in May, citing no evidence.

In the absence of any actual evidence of widespread noncitizen voting, the lawsuits brought by Trump’s allies rely on faulty data, misreadings of election law and outright fabrication to argue that election officials must purge their voter rolls with weeks to go in the election.

“These guys are going to try whatever they can,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “They’ve found themselves in a place where either their candidates or their views are becoming less and less popular, so they’ve got to manipulate folks outside the regular issues.”

The Lawsuits

Fontes’ office is a target — along with every county election officer in Arizona — of a lawsuit brought by Miller’s America First Legal Foundation that seeks to require the state’s federal election voters to provide citizenship documents.

Arizona currently has a two-track voting system, in which voters must provide different documents depending on what type of election they’re voting in. People must show proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, while those who do not provide such proof can only vote in nationwide elections due to federal laws limiting burdens placed on voter registration. In 2020, Trump used the number of federal-only voters to falsely claim that 36,000 noncitizens illegally voted — supposedly costing him a win in the state.

AFLF’s suit does not include any proof or verifiable claims of noncitizen voting in Arizona (or elsewhere). Instead, the group cites polling conducted by the conservative pollster Rasmussen Reports for the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, claiming that 1.9% of likely Arizona voters said they were not U.S. citizens and another 1.2% said they were not sure of their citizenship status.

“Therefore, collectively, just over three percent of likely Arizona voters in the survey disclaimed citizenship,” the lawsuit states.

Responses to poll questions, however, do not constitute evidence that any of the respondents are either noncitizens or have ever cast an illegal vote as noncitizens. Instead, they likely reveal the percentage of respondents who were not paying attention to the poll they were taking.

A 2014 paper by political science experts John Ahlquist, Kenneth Mayer and Simon Jackman found that poll respondents were similarly likely to claim to have been abducted by aliens in the past 12 months as to have engaged in voter impersonation (illegally voting as someone other than themselves) in the 2012 election.

“[T]he lower bound of the population admitting to voter impersonation is the same as that admitting to alien abduction, leading us to conclude that any lower bound estimate for voter impersonation is largely the result of respondent error rather than a true self-report of behavior,” Ahlquist, Mayer and Jackson wrote.

In North Carolina, the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of North Carolina allege that the state elections board is refusing to comply with a law passed by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature in July that required the board to remove voters from the rolls if they match jury files for persons claiming to be noncitizens to get out of jury duty.

The RNC’s lawsuit provides no evidence that any noncitizen has voted. Instead, it simply argues that because the state government reports that “approximately 325,000 ‘unauthorized’ immigrants” reside in the state, “there may be significant numbers of non-citizens who have registered to vote.”

The allegation that the board is not complying with North Carolina law is “categorically false,” board spokesman Patrick Gannon said in a statement over email.

County clerks provided the board with lists of registered voters who claimed to be noncitizens to be excused from jury duty in August, according to Gannon. The board then compared those lists with state voter registration records and found a total of nine voters who matched. Those nine people will be checked against state and federal databases to see whether they are citizens. If they are indeed noncitizens, the board will send them letters inviting them to cancel their registrations. This is the process the board must follow because of the 90-day blackout period prohibiting voter purges so close to an election.

“We ask that the NCGOP and RNC immediately rescind their press releases on this topic, as they will undermine voter confidence on an entirely false premise,” Gannon said.

As for those nine registered voters who claimed to be noncitizens to get out of jury duty, there is no evidence at this time that they actually are.

“Often people who are citizens are just trying to get out of jury duty,” said Lis Frost, a lawyer with the Elias Law Group, a Democratic Party-aligned law firm responding to these lawsuits.

These lawsuits in Arizona and North Carolina lack any real evidence. However, they pale in comparison to the sweeping, evidence-free claims made by another group in lawsuits across seven states where a ruling would fall within the 90-day blackout period.

United Sovereign Americans is a grassroots group promoting the idea that every election across the country is effectively illegitimate due to its claims of corrupted voter rolls. It was founded in 2023 by election denial activist Marly Hornik, whose canvassing effort aimed at proving election fraud in the 2022 New York state elections led the state’s attorney general to issue a cease-and-desist letter.

The group now claims that upward of 10 million votes cast in the 2022 elections across 20 states were illegitimate and should not have been counted. Its lawsuits in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas all make similar claims that the states’ voter rolls contain error rates that exceed the level allowed by federal law and that they should therefore not be certified. The group explicitly states that the number of lawsuits it has filed is in an effort to get their claim before the Supreme Court before the 2024 election.

To make such a sweeping declaration, the group relies on a data analysis of voter registration files to find supposed errors such as duplicate voter registrations, altered birthdates, backdated registrations, registrations on weekends or federal holidays, and the failure to include a social security or driver’s license number, among other things.

Most of their complaints about supposed errors in state voter rolls, however, appear to be the result of their own faulty methodology for reviewing the data, misreadings of election law and potential clerical errors.

The group’s biggest problem is that its data analysis methodology is flawed. The analyst it relied on compiled Maryland voter registration data from multiple years into a single spreadsheet to look for questionable registrations, according to a brief filed by the Brennan Center in a case the group brought in Maryland earlier this year. But whenever a voter updates their registration information, a new line is created in the state’s datafile, providing a new unique voter ID number. By combining multiple years of data, United Sovereign Americans’ datafile produced numerous false positives for duplicate voter registrations, which it cites as evidence of errors in the voter file.

In its lawsuit in North Carolina, the group makes similar allegations of high rates of errors that are similarly incorrect. It claims that 209,718 voters lacked a social security or driver’s license number in their registration, as well as that 207,196 voters registered on a weekend or federal holiday.

But there is no law preventing voters from registering on weekends or holidays — as a resident could do through the state’s online voter registration portal.

As for the lack of a social security or driver’s license number, some voters registered to vote before federal law first mandated the inclusion of a social security or driver’s license number for voter registration records in 2005. In other cases, some of the matches the group cites are married women who changed their last names. Finally, North Carolina state law requires voters to show identification when they appear to vote.

“Until they bring any evidence, we don’t have anything to discuss here,” said David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Why didn’t they bring these lawsuits until the blackout window? I think the answer is pretty clear. This is about politics and about feeding the lie that the election was stolen.”

A New Road To The Same Goal

When Trump lied about election fraud in 2020, it was only the first part of his push to overturn the election. He also sought to exploit the process for counting electoral votes, first by producing alternate slates of electors from key swing states, then by pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to use those alternate slates to deny Biden the vote in states he won. Finally, when none of that worked, Trump incited a violent mob on Congress to derail the counting of those votes.

This half-baked plan did not work — and it would be impossible to do again in 2024. Harris, not Pence or another GOP official, will preside over the counting of the electoral votes. Meanwhile, Congress has since reformed the Electoral Count Act to make it impossible for states to submit alternate electors. It’s also unlikely that any GOP electors would want to follow Trump’s plans after 35 of his fraudulent electors were indicted for their actions in 2020.

Instead, as the United Sovereign Americans lawsuits make plain, any effort to contest the outcome of the election this year would run through efforts by local GOP election officials refusing to certify the election.

“[Certification] is the lever that election conspiracy theorists see as the best opportunity if they don’t like the choice the voters have made,” said Ben Berwick, head of litigation for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that counters election denial.

Election deniers first took aim at the certification process in 2020, when two Republican members of the four-member canvassing board in Wayne County, Michigan (which includes Detroit), initially decided on their own to refuse to certify the county’s election amid a flurry of false claims of voter fraud fueled by Trump.

“Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results! Having courage is a beautiful thing. The USA stands proud!” Trump posted on social media at the time.

The two canvassing board members, however, quickly relented under extreme pressure from local voters and the national attention their action brought. That was not before Trump and then-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel attempted to pressure the board members into maintaining their refusal. But the idea caught hold in the larger election denial movement.

In 2022, county GOP officials tasked with certifying elections in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania voted against certification in both the primary and general elections. Their refusals did not necessarily flow from a loss by a particular candidate, but as part of a general distrust of election results following Trump’s campaign of election fraud lies in 2020. The officials refused to certify based on debunked and otherwise wild conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and how “hot dog tongs could have breached” voting machines, as well as refusals to abide by court decisions regarding the counting of certain mailed ballots.

These votes against certification were all beaten back. The certification of elections is a nondiscretionary ministerial duty of the officers who oversee it, meaning it is illegal to impose their personal political views on the process. In each case, the threat of — or actual — court orders to produce writs mandating certification forced the hands of nearly all of these officials. Every county’s election results were ultimately certified thanks to the intervention of state officials and the courts.

But in 2024, that hasn’t stopped the spread of GOP fantasies of blocking the certification of election results. There are currently at least 35 election deniers in position to vote against certification in counties across the country, according to a report by the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“There are going to be numerous counties across the country not certifying,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the pro-voting rights nonprofit Common Cause. “It’s going to be a lot more than in previous years as there is a much more organized campaign around this behavior that is being pushed by the right.”

And this is where any effort to steal the election starts to fall apart.

Those who support not certifying the elections believe that denying or delaying county certification would prevent state officials from certifying the statewide winner by the Dec. 11 deadline imposed by the Electoral Count Reform Act. This could then lead an entire state’s results to be excluded from the electoral vote count in Congress on Jan. 6, 2025 — which could in turn have obviously catastrophic results in a close race.

This scenario is one reason why election watchdogs have been so concerned about the actions taken by the three GOP members of the Georgia State Election Board. The board has recently passed divisive new rules, such as mandating the hand-counting of election ballots, that could create significant delays in both the initial vote counting process and the certification of those results by local officials. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has spoken out against the board’s rules, warning that it was “destroying voter confidence” in elections.

While this situation may be concerning and outlandish, it also runs counter to the actual rules already in place, which carry the backing of the rest of the governmental machine. First, it’s illegal for local officials to refuse to certify election results. In each previous case, courts have stepped in to force wayward officials to certify in no uncertain terms. And if those local officials still refuse, they can be indicted and prosecuted, as happened to two officials in Cochise County, Arizona.

“We’ve got a little bit of a hammer here in Arizona in that we’re kind of operating under the FAFO rule — mess around and find out,” Fontes said, using an acronym for the phrase “fuck around and find out.”

Second, county-level certification refusals do not impact state executive decisions to certify the statewide results, meaning states could go ahead and confirm their electoral votes no matter what the county officials choose to do. Third, the Electoral Count Reform Act details instructions for courts to hear cases involving certification that occur after the Dec. 11 deadline on an extremely expedited basis, giving officials yet another path to confirm the results despite opposition stalling. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Trump-backed election deniers who ran for key offices overseeing elections in swing states in 2022 all lost.

Democratic and Republican officials across the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin adamantly assert that they will fight certification refusals in the courts, seize the power to certify county election results if necessary and honor the actual winner of their states.

Of course, Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election were laughable at the time —until they weren’t. Any attempt to illegally overturn the 2024 election could yet again cause chaos and violence where unlikely things can transpire. Still, election experts expect the dam to hold.

“While their strategy will fail, there’s no line they won’t cross,” Becker said. “The period after the election could be very volatile, but I’m 100% confident the winner will have their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20.”