Trump Is Ready to Flood Courts With Election Fraud Claims

Getting ready for another “Stop the Steal” effort?
Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

People are understandably anxious about Donald Trump repeating some of his more notorious stunts from 2020 after a possible 2024 election loss. These may include a premature declaration of victory based on efforts to undermine the legitimacy of mail ballots; attempted interventions in the electoral vote certification process by Republican state legislatures; and, of course, another challenge to the final confirmation of the winner by Congress in early January 2025. Some of these avenues for contesting an election were narrowed by the enactment of the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, along with the reality that Kamala Harris will be the presiding officer when Congress first convenes in 2025.

Given Team Trump’s renewed efforts to deem a Biden win in 2024 as “rigged,” these fears seem warranted. But however Trump decides to act on his prefabricated “rigged election” claims, he needs more raw material than he had to work with in 2020. And it appears he is assembling an army to do just that, according to a report from Politico:

Former President Donald Trump’s political operation said Thursday that it plans to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers across battleground states to monitor — and potentially challenge — vote counting in November.

The initiative — which the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee described as “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history” — will include training poll watchers and workers as well as lawyers.

You have to appreciate that even Trump recognizes the election fraud claims his lawyers had to work with in 2020 were inadequate. If Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and Jenna Ellis sometimes seemed deranged in their wild allegations of irregularities in the vote count, it was partly because of the limited set of allegations in their briefcases. That mistake won’t be repeated, Politico suggests:

Trump has privately complained that his political apparatus was not adequately prepared for the legal battles in the 2020 election. He has made clear to advisers that he would like a more robust effort to be able to challenge election results as needed.

It’s also a sign that, should Trump once again attempt to overturn the election, he will already have in place tens of thousands of workers who could help with that effort.

The most commonly cited statistic about Team Trump’s 2020 election-coup effort is that it filed 62 fraud claims in federal and state courts, and lost in 61 cases. And in a lot of these, Trump’s lawyers had weak cases with very little evidence, as the Washington Post reported in the middle of the legal offensive:

Since Election Day, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that a broad conspiracy of misdeeds — apparently committed in both Republican and Democratic states — had cost him the election …

But in the lawsuits themselves, even Trump’s campaign and allies do not allege widespread fraud or an election-changing conspiracy.

Instead, GOP groups for the most part have focused on smaller-bore complaints in an effort to delay the counting of ballots or claims that would affect a small fraction of votes, at best.

And, even then, they have largely lost in court.

The reason: Judges have said the Republicans did not provide evidence to back up their assertions — just speculation, rumors or hearsay.

Presumably 100,000 poll watchers can do a bit better than that, even if they don’t come close to making a compelling case that the outcome of the election is affected by whatever they see or claim to see. If nothing else, they can flood the judicial zone with allegations that slow down the process for finalizing the election and feed MAGA outrage in ways that are useful to Trump. Think about how long it took to definitively take down just one bogus Trump-Giuliani claim about 2020 involving the vote counting in Georgia, as this NBC News report from June 2023 shows:

Years after their lives were turned upside down by conspiracy theorists, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, were officially cleared by Georgia authorities on Tuesday.

Georgia’s State Election Board dismissed its yearslong investigation into alleged election fraud at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, more than two years after conspiracy theorists — and then-President Donald Trump — claimed that Freeman and her daughter had committed election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The fraud claims were “unsubstantiated and found to have no merit,” the investigation concluded, reporting on the work of the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and investigators from the Secretary of State’s office vetting the alleged fraud.

These allegations centered on an observed exchange of ginger mints between the two election workers that got blown up into an allegation of voting data fraud. You have to assume a massively expanded cadre of Trump “observers” will fan suspicions and generate lawsuits on a truly grand scale. Be forewarned.