Opinion | Trump’s allies are busy building out 2024 election denial infrastructure

When former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he triggered a desperate attempt to remain in office that falsely claimed Democrats had engineered widespread voter fraud. This time around, he’ll lack the powers an incumbent has to use his office as weapon. No longer having those internal levers of power to pull, though, has only meant a shift in tactics from his allies, not in their overall strategy. And as his Election Day rematch against President Joe Biden approaches, the infrastructure being built to delegitimize a Trump loss is becoming increasingly obvious.

While unable to lean on the Department of Justice this time around, Trump is not entirely without institutional power at his disposal. Several states have filed charges against organizers and participants in the “fake electors” plot. In those plots, Republican presidential electors signed off on fraudulent Electoral College certificates that declared Trump the winner in their state. The goal was to cause enough chaos that Vice President Mike Pence would either throw out their state’s electoral votes or kick the can to state legislatures to hand Trump a win. Despite their criminal liability, several members of the plot have already been appointed as Electoral College members again or expressed a willingness to serve.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has been laying the groundwork to discredit a potential Biden win. I’ve previously written about the RNC’s renewed focus on “election integrity” efforts, following Trump’s orders to place their energy there rather traditional field programs to get voters to the polls. Axios recently reported that the RNC now “plans to hire more people for the [election integrity] operation than for any other department” ahead of the election, as it also aims “to recruit and deploy 100,000 volunteers, law students and lawyers to serve as poll watchers and observers.”

We’re already beginning to see some of the legal maneuvering for advantage play out in Wisconsin, where the RNC has alleged that two predominantly Democratic counties discriminated against Republicans who applied to be poll watchers. In what is likely to become a pattern, the suit claims that, despite a glut of applicants to take part as observers, election officials in Dane and Milwaukee counties arbitrarily and unfairly rejected most of them. However, the election officials say that everything was above board, and in one case went so far as to provide Wisconsin Public Radio with “contact logs that showed the named complainant did not respond to five emails reminding him to complete his application.”

The most optimistic reading of these efforts could be found in a draft RNC internal report The Washington Post obtained last year that made the case for increasing the organization’s election integrity efforts. “If there is corruption in the election infrastructure, then having Republicans in the system will expose many issues,” the Post quoted from the draft. “Second, if Republicans see how the election process works up close, then they will be able to identify and fix problems, instead of boycotting elections entirely.” In giving skeptical Republicans a look beneath the hood, so to speak, the hope is that their concerns will be alleviated. It’s not impossible to change minds on this front, as when conservatives joined local school boards and learned that “critical race theory” isn’t being taught to students.

It only works though if the poll watchers being recruited are open to believing that the election isn’t rigged — and that is absolutely not the message coming from Trump’s orbit. The Daily Signal, a conservative media outlet, published an essay Monday called “America Is Under Attack.” The inflammatory piece is one of the site’s first after declaring itself independent from The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that had housed it. Among the lies pushed by the pseudonymous author is that there’s no way for the 2024 election to be legitimate:

The dark warnings from that essay were attention-grabbing, but a piece the site published Tuesday is even more concerning. Levi Fuller, an assistant attorney general with the Texas Office of the Attorney General and therefore someone in a real position of power, argues at length that the 2020 election was rife with irregularities and that “you should never be afraid to question the results of an election.” The insinuations he makes are flimsy at best, but continues the drumbeat of propaganda that the “experts” aren’t to be fully trusted. Fuller, who laments that the likes of Trump-allied lawyer Sidney Powell have faced consequences for their lies, spends paragraphs pointing to Fulton County, Georgia, as proof that something worth questioning happened.

Fulton County is also the site of a new legal effort to give election deniers more power to refuse to certify elections. Rolling Stone reported Tuesday that Julie Adams, a member of the county’s election board, filed a lawsuit requesting that a judge “clarify” that her “duties are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.” In other words, she wants the courts to say that her panel is empowered to act as an investigator rather than a clerk passing records up the chain. Notably, she was aided in filing this suit by the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.

It’s telling that Fuller, who was previously a prosecutor in the Texas attorney general’s Election Integrity Division, didn’t say how often in his career he came across voter fraud. That’s likely because, in contrast to Republican fearmongering, data shows that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. But if Biden beats Trump again, expect Republicans to once again say voter fraud is to blame. Even mythical voter fraud makes for a good scapegoat for a party that is low on funds, has a criminally convicted presumptive nominee, and would much rather keep certain people from voting than admit that it earned its losses fair and square.