How could allies of Donald Trump challenge the US election result?

As polls close across the US on Tuesday evening, an army of Republican activists are expected to set into motion a plan they have been working on for months: to legally challenge results that go against Donald Trump at local, state and federal levels.

Unlike in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when efforts to subvert the election outcome were haphazard and spread across disparate pressure groups, the Republican party has vowed to “fight for every legal vote” in a co-ordinated fashion, by filing a flurry of claims of unlawful registrations, voter suppression and procedural irregularities. 

The party plans to deploy 230,000 volunteers, including many attorneys, across “every battleground state” to monitor alleged fraud. “I expect them to attempt to bollix up the works if they can,” said Jerry Goldfeder, the director of Fordham law school’s voting rights and democracy project. 

Kamala Harris’s campaign has drafted its own team of heavy-hitters, including former White House counsel Dana Remus, to fight election interference efforts in the event of a narrow Trump defeat.

Here are three of the challenges they will most likely face.

Challenging the counts

Attempts to force full hand-counting of ballots in several states have been largely unsuccessful but, as in 2020, Trump allies will be watching for irregularities in the tallying of votes across the country’s polling stations.

The complex patchwork of election laws in the US, in which registration, counting procedures and technology differ in neighbouring states and even neighbouring counties, makes it easier for agitators to cry foul.

With 50mn Americans having cast their votes ahead of election day, a number of claims have already been made over the accuracy of signatures on paper ballots, absentee voting fraud, undated mail-in ballots and duplicate voting — mostly without success.

The Republican National Committee and affiliated groups have filed dozens of lawsuits arguing that illegal aliens were not being purged from voter rolls, despite little evidence to suggest non-citizens have voted.

The Institute of Strategic Dialogue warned this week that social media posts by people claiming to be foreign nationals who have voted in the US election have gained millions of views on X and “appear to be part of an effort to mislead voters” about the scale of the practice.

Trump himself has already made accusations of “cheating” in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania and his campaign has claimed there is “voter suppression” in the state, because an office for registration for mail-in ballots was being closed while voters were still in line.

In the aftermath of the vote, the question will be “whether there are credible allegations that a sufficient number of legal votes have not been counted or illegal votes were counted to affect the outcome of the election”, said Nate Persily, an election law expert at Stanford.

Refusing to certify results

In the years since Trump’s defeat in 2020, dozens of local election officials have refused to certify the results of elections in their districts, alleging voter fraud. Multiple courts have since reiterated that county-level administrators have no discretion to stop certification, and federal law gives ultimate authority to state governors to ratify results by December 11.

The governors of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina are all Democrats, while the Republican governors of Georgia and Nevada have acknowledged that Joe Biden won the last election and largely resisted pressure to claim a Trump victory.

Nonetheless, election deniers remain in crucial county-level positions in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a pro-democracy group, which is among those preparing to sue those who refuse to certify. 

Even if unsuccessful in obstructing or delaying certification “if particular county commissioners there or county election officials there say that, ‘well, we tried to investigate voter fraud and irregularities and we were thwarted from doing so’, that may serve as a pretext [for election denial],” said Nikhel Sus, Crew’s deputy chief counsel.

Last ditch attempts in Congress

In January 2021, several Republican members of congress and eight senators attempted to delay or derail the ceremonial certification of results on Capitol Hill — the final step of the US electoral process — citing spurious claims of widespread election fraud.

The law has since been strengthened to make it more difficult for lawmakers to disrupt certification. Previously, a single senator and congressman could team up to raise an objection, whereas now one-fifth of the House and one-fifth of the Senate must agree and both houses have to uphold any objection for the proceedings to be paused.

House speaker Mike Johnson, who was among the congressmen who objected to Biden’s wins in Arizona and Pennsylvania four years ago, has vowed to “respect the law”, following claims from Democrats that he could once again come to Trump’s aid in January.

Nonetheless, as Richard Pildes, professor of constitutional law at New York University, has warned, if Congress does try and thwart the process, “it is not clear whether federal courts would intervene to enforce the law”.