How Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to dispute the election results – again

(CNN) — Donald Trump is re-using his 2020 playbook to baselessly claim the 2024 election is being stolen from him and is being joined by allies with big megaphones amplifying his falsehoods ahead of Election Day.

Trump has made repeated false claims that Democrats are cheating in the election, and he’s twisted isolated problems with voting leading up to Election Day, all in an effort to prime his supporters to falsely believe the election is not legitimate if he loses.

This includes saying voting by noncitizens is a widespread problem. He’s claimed there’s no verification for overseas or military ballots. He’s claimed election officials are using early voting to commit fraud. He’s claimed that massive swaths of mail-in ballots are illegitimate, even as he’s encouraged his supporters to use mail voting this time around.

Most importantly, Trump has claimed that the only way Vice President Kamala Harris can win the election is by cheating.

The claims are baseless.

“It’s unfortunate that he sees his path back to the White House as denigrating a basic American institution like elections,” said Ben Ginsberg, a CNN contributor and Republican campaign attorney who has served as general counsel for several previous GOP nominees. “If you’re just starting to pay attention to this, the claims that you’re hearing in 2024 about the election system not being reliable is extraordinarily similar to what he and his supporters were saying in 2020.”

In 2020, Trump lost a close election, and then spent two months trying to overturn the result. In 2024, with polls signaling a razor-thin election in seven battleground states, election officials are bracing for another firehose of misinformation about the result – especially if the election hinges on the results of hundreds of ballots in one or two states.

Election experts say that despite the viral and hyperbolic claims, the vast majority of voters will almost assuredly experience a swift and uneventful experience whenever they vote, whether it’s through early voting, vote-by-mail or on Election Day.

As early voting has gotten underway, many local and state officials are showing they intend to proactively knock down falsehoods about the election that spread like wildfire on social media.

Voter fraud is rare, but when it does happen, it is usually caught thanks to the layers of safeguards built into voting processes, according to nonpartisan election experts.

“It’s really useful to remind people in this time of heightened anxiety, all the way around, that they’re still in charge (to decide the election outcome),” said Justin Levitt, a CNN contributor and election law expert at Loyola Law School who served as a voting rights adviser in the Biden White House.

“There’s a ton of noise out there right now. If this election is more than a 537-vote margin in any of the swing states, none of the noise will matter,” Levitt added, referencing the margin in Florida during the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Still, that hasn’t always stopped conspiracy theories from spreading on social media – including from Elon Musk, the CEO of X, who has poured tens of millions of dollars into boosting Trump’s campaign. Election officials warn they’re outmatched and struggling to combat the wave of falsehoods coming from Musk and his platform.

An intense focus on Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania could be the state where the 2024 campaign is decided, and it’s become ground zero for both legal fights over voting rules – and the spread of misinformation.

Trump has already claimed without evidence that his opponents are cheating in the state, both on his social media and at campaign rallies. At a Tuesday rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump claimed that the discovery of hundreds of suspected fraudulent voter registration applications in Lancaster County was evidence of cheating.

Lancaster election officials and the county district attorney announced last week they received a batch of suspected fraudulent voter registration applications, which had similar handwriting, incorrect information and other problems.

But that is hardly evidence of cheating – and in fact it shows the system worked to flag the applications, thanks to the checks in place to verify voters’ personal information and signatures before any ballots are cast, said Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state.

“All these safeguards make sure that this doesn’t impact voting,” said Boockvar, a Democrat who is now president of Athena Strategies. “What it doesn’t do is it doesn’t actually make it any more likely that there’s going to be any more improper votes, thanks to all those guardrails in place.”

Because the state’s presidential election is so contested, it’s become a tinderbox for claims of fraud to spread like wildfire.

Last month, a conservative activist claimed voter fraud on X, in a post that quickly went viral, because 53 voters were registered at the same address, a Catholic church in Erie County. But it wasn’t voter fraud at all – there are 55 nuns of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie who live there.

Pennsylvania has also been the site of furious pre-election litigation, including over the rules about what mail-in ballots can be counted and how early voting is administered. Trump’s campaign and Republicans successfully sued to have Bucks County extend on-demand mail over complaints that voters had been turned away.

Elon Musk’s misinformation machine

Election experts say that misinformation surrounding a presidential election is nothing new. But what’s changed is the volume of viral claims that they’re trying desperately to keep up with.

Musk’s 2022 acquisition of X, formerly known as Twitter, has only added fuel to the fire, as he has pushed out numerous conspiracies to his 200 million followers on the site, as well as at town halls to support Trump’s candidacy.

Social media has been used in past elections to fuel conspiracies, including by foreign actors in 2016. But X and other social media companies have pivoted away from efforts to combat falsehoods spread on their sites.

Musk’s tactics have pushed election officials to go so far as to try – unsuccessfully – to personally convince him to stop spreading baseless claims that could mislead voters.

In Michigan this past week, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson tried to push back on a claim Musk shared about registered voters in Michigan, accusing him of “spreading dangerous disinformation.” Musk responded that Benson was “blatantly lying to the public.”

Musk was latching onto claims alleging there were more ballots cast in Michigan’s early voters than there were identified voters, which the secretary of state’s office said was due to a data “formatting error” that was corrected.

While Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, posted on X that her team had confirmed this issue was due to a glitch, that didn’t stop others in the conservative media ecosystem from continuing to amplify claims of fraud – refusing to back down from claims of a larger conspiracy.

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, after spending 24 hours consuming pro-Trump media, reported the pro-Trump outlets are telling their viewers there’s no way the former president can lose, if the election is fair.

Election officials are trying to take a more proactive approach to false claims in their states and municipalities to knock them down quickly – like a false claim in Texas of a man claiming a voting machine had switched his vote.

But that’s often an uphill battle.

“The effect of all this election mis- and dis-information is when you survey people, they don’t believe anything they read online about elections, and that’s a problem when there are really great election officials trying to get information into the hands of voters,” said Ruth Greenwood, director of the election law clinic at Harvard Law School.

Manipulating early voting numbers

In 2020, Trump attacked early voting and mail-in voting, claiming they were used to cheat. His supporters, in response, largely voted on Election Day.

This time, Trump and the RNC have made a big push to use early and mail voting, even as Trump has continued to attack them.

As of five days before Election Day, more than 61 million Americans have already cast their ballots through either mail or early in-person voting. Both Democrats and Republicans have looked for positive signs for their side based on publicly available analysis of data that states report – and partisans have made sweeping predictions from the totals.

Voting and election modeling experts say that trying to game out election results based on early voting data is not statistically sound, because there are gaps in the data and the data only describes people who vote ahead of Election Day, not who they voted for or the intentions of tens of millions who will go to the polls on Tuesday.

The questionable claims about early voting data have stoked fears that the early voting numbers will be one thing that Trump and his allies use to question the election results should Harris prevail. There are also concerns that Trump is preparing to declare victory prematurely – just as he did early in the early morning hours after Election Day in 2020, before anyone had called the race.

Trump claimed he had won because he was ahead, ignoring the fact that the in-person votes, which tended to be more Republican-leaning, had been counted ahead of mail-in ballots, which leaned more Democratic.

While Republicans have embraced mail voting this year and there’s no pandemic pushing millions to vote that way, a similar phenomenon could still happen this election.

“If the trend from recent past elections continues, if Democrats are more likely to use vote-by-mail or absentee ballots and those ballots take longer to cast, then you’re going to see results shifting from Republican candidates being ahead to Democratic candidates pulling closer to them and potentially even surpassing them,” said Michael Morley, an election law professor at Florida State University College of Law. “Not because of fraud or something underhanded or nefarious going on, but because more ballots are being counted.”

Baseless claims of rampant non-citizen voting

Trump and his Republican allies have ramped up litigation as well as their rhetoric ahead of Election Day over the threat of noncitizens voting – and Trump in particular has claimed without evidence that Democrats are trying to allow non-citizens to vote.

“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump said at the September presidential debate. “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote.”

Republicans have sought ahead of the election to purge voter rolls of suspected noncitizens. The Supreme Court sided with Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Wednesday, allowing the state to continue with a program that state officials say is aimed at removing suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls.

Voting rights groups have pointed to evidence that Virginia’s voter purge effort also caught up citizens who are eligible to vote.

The Justice Department also sued Alabama this fall over the state’s effort to remove more than 3,000 names from its voter rolls, arguing it violated federal law against such an action taking place too close to an election.

Experts say illegal voting by non-citizens is extremely rare, and when it does happen, it is usually caught quickly. A recent Georgia audit of the 8.2 million people on its rolls found just 20 registered noncitizens – only nine of whom had voted.

And Michigan earlier this week charged a Chinese citizen with voter fraud and perjury after he allegedly cast a ballot for the 2024 election, which experts say shows how rare instances of illicit voting are uncovered.

The focus on noncitizen voting has led to false allegations against Americans, too. In Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, election officials issued a statement Wednesday debunking a viral video alleging non-citizens cut the line and were allowed to vote at an early voting site. In fact, the video showed a group of registered voters who needed the assistance of translators, according to a county spokesperson.

Republican litigation has also targeted overseas ballots cast by Americans living abroad and military service members. Trump falsely claimed that Democrats were trying to cheat with overseas ballots.

“The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas. Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!” he wrote on Truth Social in September.

But courts in multiple jurisdictions have rejected Republican challenges to the procedures for vetting overseas ballots and to set aside ballots for additional checks of voters’ eligibility.

Fears of another attempt to challenge the result

Since the chaos in the aftermath of the 2020 election, officials have spent the past four years preparing both for increased threats of violence and efforts to block the certification of a legitimate election result.

Election officials have been inundated with threats of violence since the 2020 election. They’ve responded in 2024 by stepping up efforts to protect polling places and their workers on Election Day, including with bulletproof glass, wearable panic buttons and open lines of communication with local law enforcement.

Last month, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned that “election-related grievances” could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence before and after the November election.

Ballots and drop boxes have been targeted already. Authorities are investigating fires at ballot boxes in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, where hundreds of ballots were destroyed or damaged.

Once all the votes are cast, election officials and experts are preparing to try to stop a repeat of the 2020 election, where Trump sought out multiple avenues to try to overturn his election loss, culminating in his supporters rioting at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Election officials and experts say they hope to avoid a repeat of 2020, where if Trump loses the election, he and his allies make baseless claims that the other side cheated and the result is illegitimate.

There have been steps taken to blunt any attempt to of a 2020 repeat: Congress, for instance, updated the Electoral Count Act, the law that governs the January 6 congressional certification of the presidential election, in an attempt to make it harder to block certification.

But Trump and his allies have been laying the groundwork to try to dispute the election should he lose.

The “Stop the Steal” movement has already reemerged before Election Day, and many of those activists have been telling their supporters that the only way Trump can lose in 2024 is through fraud.

In Georgia, conservatives sought to allow county election officials to refuse to certify the election results, though the effort was blocked by a state judge.

Another Trump ally, Maryland GOP Rep. Andy Harris, suggested last week that North Carolina’s GOP-controlled state legislature could award the state’s electoral votes to Trump before votes are even counted, arguing there was possible disenfranchisement of voters in western North Carolina due to complications from Hurricane Helene.

If Trump believes there is systemic fraud in the election, he will have the opportunity to prove it in the courts, just as he did after the 2020 election.

Ginsberg, the GOP election attorney, noted that the Republican National Committee’s plans for 200,000 poll watchers means the Trump campaign should be able to provide evidence to back up any alleged fraud claims.

“That means they ought to have hard evidence of anything that’s amiss,” he said. “And if they can’t produce hard evidence, then that should be a pretty clear indication that it once again is rhetorical smoke and not evidence.”

CNN’s Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Sarah Boxer, Pamela Brown, Ethan Cohen, Marshall Cohen, Zachary Cohen, Devan Cole, Daniel Dale, Curt Devine, Danny Freeman, John Fritze, Brian Fung, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Holmes, Lybrand, Sean Lyngaas, Sara Murray, Paula Reid, Fredreka Schouten, Tierney Sneed, Donie O’Sullivan and Casey Tolan contributed to this report.

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