How Trump allies are sowing election doubts

Tina Barton will never forget the moment someone threatened to kill her and her family. It was November 2020; Barton, then a city clerk in the battleground state of Michigan, had just administered the most stressful election she had ever experienced.

Her team had accidentally sent in a vote count to county officials twice; though the mistake was rapidly corrected — during a period dedicated to accuracy checks — a Republican official claimed the mix-up had given Democrats more votes. Days later came the terrifying voicemail, which said Barton deserved a knife to the throat. “You frauded out America of a real election,” the caller said.

“That is not something that election officials ever signed up for. It’s never something that they’ve had to worry about,” says Barton, a 52-year-old registered Republican. She now works for the non-partisan Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE), which trains police and officials.

Four years later, election workers are bracing themselves. Even as he faces felony charges for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Donald Trump has given multiple signals that he would again challenge any result that showed him losing.   

“The only way [Democrats] can win is to CHEAT,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social in July. “That’s how they get an incapacitated moron like Joe Biden elected.”

In last month’s TV debate with Kamala Harris, when asked if he acknowledged losing in 2020, Trump said no. “Our elections are bad,” he claimed, before launching into a conspiracy theory about Democrats allowing undocumented immigrants into the country to vote.

That year, Trump’s attempt to subvert the election was intense and widespread, culminating in the deadly January 6 assault on the Capitol by his supporters. But at the same time it seemed largely improvised, marked by events like the now infamous press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

This time around, any campaign to challenge the results will be spurred by the spread of conspiracy theories over the last four years. These have been amplified by organised, well-funded efforts that cast doubt on US elections. Under the banner of “election integrity”, rightwing organisations have spent millions of dollars filing lawsuits contesting election procedures, recruiting poll watchers and challenging the eligibility of thousands of voters, particularly in swing states.

According to Financial Times findings from over 200 public records requests, primarily rightwing groups and individuals have challenged the registrations of more than 100,000 people in states including Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Nevada since November 2020. All will be key to the election.

Republicans insist they are defending the integrity of the election. “President Trump has been very clear: we must have free and fair elections,” says Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign.

None of us knew when we went into 2020 what was waiting for us on the other side of election day. I’m concerned that none of us know today

“While Democrats continue to interfere in our election and dismantle election safeguards, we are protecting the vote for all Americans,” says Claire Zunk, a spokesperson on election integrity for the RNC, which oversees the activities of the party.

While the success of individual efforts has varied, collectively they set the stage for controversy if the result is close, as seems highly likely. Since 2020, the claim that widespread voter fraud led to Trump’s loss — allegations debunked and almost unanimously dismissed in court — have metastasised into an array of conspiracy theories casting doubt on the US election system.

A 2023 CNN poll found that roughly a third of Americans — and more than two-thirds of Republicans — believe that Biden’s win was illegitimate. And, according to the non-profit States United Action, out of 435 members of the US House of Representatives, 152 members have publicly denied the results.

In 2020, Mike Johnson, then a relatively unknown Republican congressman, organised a majority of his colleagues to support a Trump-backed lawsuit that sought to invalidate the results in four key states. Now he is House Speaker, one of the most powerful roles in US politics.

“None of us knew when we went into 2020 what was waiting for us on the other side of election day,” says Barton of the CSSE. “I’m concerned that none of us know today.”

The US runs a complex and sprawling election system, with different rules and procedures depending on the state. In some places, people vote with paper ballots; elsewhere, voting machines. Counting procedures vary. States are responsible for declaring their own results, and a mistake by any of the thousands of local officials administering elections — even a tiny clerical error, such as happened to Barton — can quickly become a conspiracy theory.

At the same time, there is a genuine need for more funding to support administration and upgrade ageing election infrastructure, including voting machines. These complexities and nuances have become fertile territory for far-right activists to spread claims about voter fraud.

“It’s a big, huge system that spans 50 states and who knows how many individual jurisdictions,” says Clint Swift, a data scientist at the non-partisan Protect Democracy, a pro-democracy non-profit.

“There are just so many points at which a minor error could occur. And it could get blown up into something really big,” he says.

Confusion about the mechanics can also feed claims about voter fraud. In some states, pre-processing of mailed ballots, such as checking envelopes and verifying signatures, is not permitted, which affects how quickly votes are tallied. In 2020, in part because of this rule, it took longer to count mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, which skewed towards Biden — part of an apparent “blue shift” that fed into Trump’s false claim that Democrats had committed mail-ballot fraud to win.

It is into this turbulent atmosphere that the RNC and rightwing organisations have launched legal actions to crack down on what they see as voter fraud. In September, the RNC won a legal victory in the swing state of North Carolina, when a Republican-dominated appeals court ruled that only physical forms of ID met the state’s requirements. This will disqualify smartphone IDs given to students at one of the state’s largest universities, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

In several swing states, the RNC has also accused state governments of not maintaining voter rolls correctly. In a March suit filed in Nevada, the RNC used 2022 Census population data to argue that several counties had more registered voters than there were voting-eligible citizens.

In a rebuttal, Nevada officials insisted that the RNC’s claims were based on outdated data. “This is part of a troubling trend of similar lawsuits,” wrote the state’s attorney-general, Aaron Ford, in a motion to dismiss the case. The lawsuit “appears to be an attempt to fan the flames of mis- and distrust in the election process”. The suit is pending.

Meanwhile, Trump-linked organisations like the Election Integrity Network, which is run by Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who assisted Trump’s legal challenges during the 2020 election, are mobilising conservatives across the country to “clean” voter rolls.

A rightwing vote-monitoring organisation, True the Vote, claims its 8,000 volunteers have filed over 850,000 voter registration challenges.

There are just so many points at which a minor error could occur. And it could get blown up into something really big

Using state laws that allow voter registrations to be challenged, activists scour public records for potentially ineligible voters. One challenge obtained by the FT included reports from a private investigator hired to confirm a voter’s residence.

Some voters have indeed died, or moved to another jurisdiction (federal law allows a grace period of two general elections before the names of voters who’ve moved are deleted). But many challenges have been rejected owing to faulty evidence, improper paperwork or because the people in question have already been flagged.

In Ottawa County, Michigan, according to emails sent to local election officials and obtained by the FT, a group called CheckMyVote flagged roughly 12,000 people — about 4 per cent of the population.

In its challenge, the organisation shared a spreadsheet listing over 100 voters they marked as suspicious because they were registered to one address, that of the First United Methodist Church in the small town of Holland. The church told the FT that it allowed people to list this as their mailing address, including those experiencing homelessness and who need a physical address when applying for a job, services or ID.

Anyone challenging voter rolls should be “careful that their solution doesn’t create a real, legitimate problem, which is violating people’s rights,” says Michael Siegrist, township clerk of Canton, Michigan. “To me, that’s the biggest danger.”

In reviewing 157 challenges filed earlier this year, Siegrist says he found that two members of the military, who are eligible to vote in Canton despite temporarily being based elsewhere, had been flagged. If the challenge had been accepted, they would have been erroneously marked as inactive.

Chuck Muth from the Citizen Outreach Foundation, a conservative organisation that participates in Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, says some groups make “wild allegations” without proof.

The non-profit, which claims to have filed over 34,000 challenges in Nevada, has tried to work with clerks from a “position of co-operation”, says Muth. His main concern, he says, is that Nevada’s post-pandemic practice of mailing ballots to all active voters could result in fraud. Even at a small scale, it could be enough to swing a close local election, argues Muth.

So far, there has been little evidence of mail-ballot fraud: a Washington Post analysis found that in the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 midterms, just 372 mail ballots cast were possibly fraudulent, out of about 14.6mn — 0.0025 per cent. As well as checking signatures on postal votes, many states also implement verification checks such as requiring voters to provide a legal witness or an ID number such as a driver’s licence.  

At the local level, voter challenges have already been used to dispute election results. In 2022, the aspiring congresswoman Charity Barry, competing in a Wisconsin Republican primary, accused over 1,900 voters of being ineligible to vote and said their ballots “should not have been counted” in an email to county officials obtained by the FT. Her challenge was not accepted; a recount of ballots later confirmed Barry’s narrow loss.

Yet even unsuccessful lawsuits can have an impact, says Jennifer Morrell from the Elections Group, a non-partisan election administration consultancy. “The more people are talking about them, in some ways, it starts to give them legitimacy.”

Beyond lawsuits and challenges, Trump-aligned Republicans are also trying to change how elections are certified — a previously prosaic administrative process that involves officials signing off counts as complete and accurate. It became politicised in 2020, when Trump pressured officials in Michigan not to certify results.

In Georgia, the Republican-dominated election board ruled in August that officials can withhold election certification to conduct a “reasonable inquiry”, without defining what reasonable would be.

At a campaign rally in August, Trump praised the members of his party responsible for the new rules. “They’re doing a great job,” said the former president, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.

Last month, that same election board voted to require officials to count ballots by hand, instead of feeding them into a tabulating machine. The change will not only delay vote tallies but studies have shown it to be less accurate, and risks causing more controversy.

In other parts of the country, election officials have fielded growing confusion and suspicion from constituents, fuelled by online rumours.

Kami Lynch, who oversees elections in Appleton, Wisconsin, says queries about election administration have increased to the point where they have started to get in the way of preparing for the election itself. Questions range from how the city prevents double-voting when residents move to how US citizenship is verified.

The latter concern, that people who are not American citizens might vote, has become a powerful talking point among some on the right in the past few years. While some cities do permit non-citizens to vote in certain local elections — such as those for school boards — figures including Elon Musk and the far-right radio show host Alex Jones have alleged without evidence that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigrants to vote in federal elections.

Voting in federal elections by people who are not US citizens is extremely rare, however, according to both the libertarian Cato Institute and the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice. In a survey of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, the latter found only 30 potential cases out of 23.5mn votes cast. Voting as a non-citizen is illegal and punishable by up to a year in federal prison.

“People aren’t necessarily combative or argumentative,” says Lynch, but they will inundate her with questions nonetheless, she adds. “No answer suffices.”

While the results could be contested again this time if Trump loses, some argue that the US court system — which played an important role in thwarting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — will act as a similar guardrail next month.

“Our system has a lot of robustness built into it . . . to make sure that the correct counts are the ones that ultimately get certified and ultimately govern the outcome of the election,” says Andrew Garber, a counsel within the Brennan Center for Justice.

In 2022, the US government passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which clarified the process of certifying presidential election results, in an effort to limit opportunities for disruptions and challenges.

Still, November will be the “greatest stress test” of US democracy and federal courts, predicts Lindsay Langholz from the progressive legal non-profit American Constitution Society. 

“I have faith that it’s still going to hold . . . but Trump’s impact on the judiciary has been noticeable,” says Langholz, pointing to the Supreme Court’s July decision giving presidents immunity for “official acts”, including, potentially, Trump’s actions during the 2020 election.

“The American people see right through Donald Trump and his allies’ transparent attempts to sow chaos at every level of our elections,” says Alex Floyd, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee.

But the fallout from 2020 has also increased co-operation between local law enforcement and election officials. There is now greater awareness and preparation, says Barton, whose workshops for the CSSE cover a wide range of risks, from AI impersonation of officials to intimidation of voters who don’t speak English.

All the planning and training around election security is “something I’ve never seen before in my career and that gives me hope”, she says.

Election officials have also made a concerted effort to be more transparent, not only by increasing outreach but by encouraging sceptics to observe the vote certification process or even help run elections themselves.

“What we’ve seen as most effective is when people actually take us up on the invitation to get involved,” says Justin Roebuck, who oversees elections in Ottawa County, Michigan.

But four years of election denialism are likely to be damaging. “When millions of people don’t believe we’ve had fair elections, it undermines democracy,” says Richard Hasen, professor at the University of California Los Angeles law school.

In the college town of East Lansing, Michigan, city clerk Marie Wicks says that while she is not concerned about her personal safety — in part because her husband is a retired police officer who owns a gun — she is still anxious about what is coming.

“I don’t worry about the election,” she says. “I worry about the aftermath.”

Additional reporting by Eade Hemingway