Two Republican officials in Arizona got charged for delaying approval of 2022 election results – and GOP state lawmakers vowed to retaliate against the Democratic attorney general who filed the charges.
Rudy Giuliani faces millions in damages for defaming two Georgia election workers in 2020 – and continued to defame them outside the courtroom.
Donald Trump himself is on trial in four jurisdictions, in part because of election subversion – and and gives public speeches on how he intends to take down his political enemies if he wins again.
Such is the dichotomy of American democracy at this moment: attempts to hold election deniers accountable for their actions are met with doubling down and more intense election denial.
Ahead of the 2020 elections, Trump foreshadowed his plan to claim the election was stolen if he lost, which his supporters often explained away as campaign trail bluster. But he and his followers took their election lies farther than many feared, culminating in an attack on the US Capitol. Biden only made it to the White House because of a handful of steadfast Republicans in key states who refused to bow to Trump’s attempts to overthrow Biden’s victory in the vote.
These days, rather than subsiding after a series of bruising losses, adherence to election denialism is now a major flank of the mainstream Republican party. Trump’s most ardent supporters, some of whom now hold public office, have even sought to reclaim the term: they agree they are in fact election deniers, and proud of it. Their continued attempts to undermine elections since, combined with vulnerabilities that haven’t been addressed, mean the US could be in for even worse this time around.
That is, if Trump loses. If he wins, he’s vowed to use the Department of Justice to pursue vengeance against those who tried to hold him accountable. He’s called his political opponents “vermin”, using the language of authoritarian dictators.
And if the urgent threat to American democracy extends from the most local levels of government to the courts and up to the presidency, it also comes at a time of fractured views of reality, with rampant rumor-spreading on social media.
The potential for harassment, threats and violence has only grown since 2020. What was ad-hoc then is now well-worn: overturning an election in 2024 depends on more believers, especially those in powerful positions, using tactics that are well documented because they have been happening across the country for several years. The playbook is, in essence, already public.
Threats from inside the government
While just a few Republicans kept democracy intact in 2020, in 2024 a few could also dismantle it.
Some prominent election deniers, like Kari Lake in Arizona and Tim Michels in Wisconsin, lost races that would have given them oversight of elections. But others won. One report by States United Democracy Center estimates that election deniers in 17 states are in top positions – like governor, attorney general or secretary of state – that oversee elections in some way.
That means some who falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged will help finalize results in 2024, making it much more possible for a presidential election to be overturned. If nothing else, they will almost certainly push delays in certifying election results (once a perfunctory process).
At lower, more direct levels of government, where it’s also easier for the far right to find a friendly ear in elected office, election deniers could refuse to send results to their states – putting local votes in jeopardy and threatening the accuracy of election results. In 2022, local Republicans officials wouldn’t certify results in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. In Colorado in late 2023, the state Republican party told local boards not to sign off on statewide elections from November because the system was “rigged” and the process “disastrous”.
A key tool of election denialism is the idea of hand counts. Grassroots groups have traveled the country since 2020 to spread word about pushing for full hand counts of ballots, finding allies like Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock executive.
Most counties do hand count a small percentage of ballots to audit machine results, but very few do it all by hand. Some officials who tried to hand count against state law in a rural Arizona county were recently charged with felonies. In California, far-right officials in Shasta county instigated a hand count, but pulled back because of a state law banning it.
Despite these failures, Telegram channels push for hand counts remain active. People show up monthly at the Cochise county board meetings in Arizona, still calling for a hand count next year. Georgia saw more hand recounts in its 2023 elections despite a lack of problems with machine counting.
Other election denial tactics tie up the government through excessive public records requests. One small county in Georgia recently shared that it’s struggling to keep up with the huge increase in records requests, filed by rightwing groups purportedly to try to prove fraud.
And there will undoubtedly be more frivolous lawsuits. In his effort to overturn his loss in 2020, Trump filed 62 lawsuits across state and federal courts – all but one of which failed. Some groups will probably file mass voter challenges claiming a broad swath of voters aren’t eligible to cast ballots, like True the Vote did in 2020.
Some Republican-led states also now have “election integrity units” that investigate claims of fraud. These units have not found evidence of mass voter fraud; instead, they mostly dig up routine instances of one-off frauds, like voting for a dead person or in multiple places. Nonetheless, the units could be weaponized in 2024 to take on broader investigations at the behest of election-denying politicians.
Beyond the elections themselves, judges could further hinder anti-discrimination laws. A federal appeals court issued a shocking ruling that would hobble civil rights groups’ ability to sue over violations to voting rights laws – removing the way voting rights laws get enforced in the courts, and putting responsibility solely on the government to bring these lawsuits instead. Another Republican-led appellate court, meanwhile, is considering a threat to the Voting Rights Act itself – the landmark achievement of the civil rights movement that makes racial discrimination in voting illegal.
Rampant misinformation leads to harassment and threats
With a proliferation of social media platforms, and the increasing politicization of fact-checking, it’ll be harder to slow down viral rumors that can affect elections – with the potential for real-world harassment or even violence at the polls.
Take the example of drop boxes. An effort to “watch” them in 2020 saw people camping out at polling stations in Arizona, sometimes holding guns, and intimidating voters. A judge eventually barred drop-box watchers from taking photos or videos of voters and from bringing weapons.
But an ongoing misinformation campaign culminated in the movie 2000 Mules, which inaccurately attempted to use cellphone location data to show people allegedly visiting non-profits then dropping off ballots – claiming, with zero proof, that there was some kind of massive ballot-trafficking scheme happening. That, too, ensnared real people and cast them as criminals: one man in Georgia sued after the movie claimed he was a ballot “mule” based on footage of him dropping off ballots entirely legally.
In perhaps the highest-profile case of abusing election workers, the Trump ally and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was just found liable for $148.1m for lies about two former election workers in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who testified their lives were torn apart after Giuliani and others falsely cast them at the center of a voter fraud conspiracy theory. Freeman had to move and no longer feels comfortable even using her name; Moss is too anxious to leave the house.
Despite the lawsuit victory, many elections workers still feel the heat. Some have been harassed out of their jobs, or had their lives threatened – as of August, 14 people had been charged with such death threats. During the 2022 midterms, elections staff in Arizona’s Maricopa county saw messages that they would “swing for treason” and wishing them to “get cancer”. This year, elections offices in several states were sent letters containing fentanyl. Many have had to train workers to prepare for harassment.
The onslaught has caused more elections workers to leave their jobs, creating high turnover that means more potential for mistakes by inexperienced people – such as in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county, where turnover played a role in several election incidents caused by human error. These mistakes can provide further ammunition for election deniers. But at the most basic level, people may be hesitant to work as poll workers or other election helpers – critical posts for the conduct of successful elections.
Social media landscape makes lies harder to stop
That same fractured social media landscape has given the far right – including big personalities such as Trump, Lindell and Steve Bannon – platforms like Telegram, Rumble and Truth Social to post content that might be flagged on more established media platforms. This creates an information ecosystem that’s outside the mainstream and difficult to track, and where heated election claims run wild. Podcasts, too – especially Bannon’s – have huge audiences and serve as a launching pad for organizing the movement and sharing plans for elections. Lindell, the pillow salesman, goes on Bannon’s podcast to share “the plan”, his step-by-step manifesto to “prevent” the stealing of elections, and to hawk his pillows.
Larger platforms, particularly X (formerly Twitter), have become less interested in monitoring and stopping election misinformation, creating more potential for it to spread during a contentious election year. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022, decimated its workforce, including factcheckers, leaving the site vulnerable to increasing misinformation. He also allowed people previously banned from the platform, including conservative operatives such as Project Veritas and the disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to have their accounts back. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, now will allow political ads to claim the 2020 election was rigged or stolen; YouTube has reversed itself and now won’t take down content that makes false claims of fraud.
In previous election cycles, researchers would flag misinformation and platforms would sometimes respond: for example, by amending fact-check notices to untrue statements. Government employees would sometimes flag these kinds of posts to tech companies as well – a practice that has come under intense scrutiny by conservatives in Congress, with the Republican Jim Jordan subpoenaing researchers about their work on misinformation. Courts have also restricted how the government can interact with social media companies in this way.
Combined, it has a chilling effect – hindering researchers’ work on misinformation, the government’s ability to respond and social media companies’ incentives to intervene. Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher, claims Harvard fired her because she was critical of Facebook.
What comes next is already happening
On the right, the narrative of 2020 as a stolen election never ended. Some of those who lost still haven’t conceded, and the contest for US House speaker swirled around who was far-right enough, with “election integrity” and allegiance to Trump considered key criteria.
There have, however, been attempts to hold election subversion accountable.
Trump faces four court cases, both criminal and civil, in several states and at the federal level.
States are investigating or have charged a number of Republicans, including some lawmakers and party officials, in the “fake elector” scheme, where people sent false electoral votes to Congress naming Trump not Biden as the winner. Defamation lawsuits proliferate. Lawyers who continually file lawsuits devoid of facts have been sanctioned across the country and face investigations by their state bar organizations.
The most ardent believers in election fraud won’t see criminal charges or big defamation damages decisions as evidence the narrative was wrong – just as further proof of a conspiracy. Nor have all the lies seemed to help the one party that didn’t attempt to steal the election, the Democrats: polls show Biden trailing Trump and his approval rating tanking over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
A plague of voter apathy could deliver Trump back to the White House. If he wins, his campaign of retribution will begin, weaponizing the federal government for his personal aims. If he loses, the plan to overturn the results kicks off again – and this time, it could work.
