Republican Party efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election

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. These unprecedented efforts include searching for and exploiting vulnerabilities in the election system; challenging ballots and the certification 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.

Background

Members of the Republican Party have for decades often asserted that the Democratic Party systematically engages in widespread election fraud. Multiple studies during this time have found that voting fraud is extremely rare. An election fraud database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation showed in 2024 evidence of just 1,513 instances of voting fraud over the preceding 42 years, though many of those instances have been challenged as dubious. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he asserted the election had been fixed against him and stolen from him. These allegations are widely regarded as lacking in credibility. Trump's 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.

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. 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. 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. Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions. The commission did not find a single instance of a noncitizen voting.

A notable quote that has been used as evidence of bad faith efforts to address voter fraud comes from Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who 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."

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 suits 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. 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.

By April 2024, dozens of Republicans in three 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. Those indicted included Trump and several of his close associates, including Christina Bobb who leads the Republican National Committee "election integrity" efforts in the 2024 presidential election.

Activities

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.

By 2023, organizations funded by dark money have 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.

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 (and in Arizona, actual) criminal charges. 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 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.

During the campaign, Trump often referred to "election integrity" to allude to his continuing lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, as well as baseless 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."

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. An April 2024 Cato Institute review of the Heritage Foundation election fraud database found just 85 irregularities involving noncitizens over the preceding 22 years.

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. Critics said the RNC plans created a risk that election workers might face harassment and undermine trust in the election process.

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. 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."

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."

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. 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.

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 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. 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. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law has called EagleAI "a vehicle to disenfranchise voters and spread disinformation."

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.

Before and after President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 election campaign on July 21, 2024, some Republicans and the Heritage Foundation were publicly suggesting they might sue to prevent another candidate from appearing on state ballots. Election administration and legal experts said such an attempt was likely to fail because Biden had not been nominated by his party.