America on edge – part two: How Trump is preparing to challenge this year’s election results
If he loses to Kamala Harris, Donald Trump has already laid the groundwork to mount new claims of fraud. In an historically close race, Americans fear it will lead to violence.
US Election
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Donald Trump will not concede if Kamala Harris wins November’s US election. This is not idle speculation but rather the former president’s deliberately expressed intention.
“If I lose – I’ll tell you what, it’s possible, because they cheat,” he said last month.
“That’s the only way we’re gonna lose, because they cheat.”
Mr Trump – who never accepted he was beaten by Joe Biden in 2020 – has spent months laying the groundwork to challenge this year’s results. His claims of fraud and interference are backed by a battalion of Republican lawyers already fighting in the courts.
For the 78-year-old, the stakes could not be higher. Losing to Ms Harris would not only spell the end of his career – it would deprive him of the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card to end the criminal prosecution of his 2020 election subversion bid.
In an historically close race, this is a recipe for chaos and confusion. Four years after Mr Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol to prevent the transition of power, Americans fear it is also a recipe for more violence.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” the Republican said in May.
“If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Mr Trump has been sowing multiple seeds of doubt about this year’s election. He claims illegal immigrants will vote en masse and mail-in ballots are fraudulent. He has called Ms Harris’s nomination an “unconstitutional coup”, after she replaced Mr Biden, and accused both of them of orchestrating the charges against him in an “election interference” plot.
The upshot of all this, according to a Gallup poll, is just 57 per cent of Americans believe the votes will be accurately cast and counted – the lowest level in two decades. Barely one in four Republicans are confident in the integrity of the election.
While voters trust their local polling station, they are sceptical about others. Bipartisan Policy Center senior fellow Kim Wyman, the Department of Homeland Security’s former election security adviser, says this stems from all 50 states setting their own rules.
The veteran election administrator highlights Pennsylvania – the most important battleground state up for grabs – where election workers cannot begin sorting mail-in ballots until polling day, making it unlikely the results will be finalised on the night.
“That continues to sow the doubt that people have that the election is somehow not being well run or is somehow rigged,” Ms Wyman, a Republican, said.
In Georgia, another swing state, Republicans overhauled their election board and appointed members Mr Trump has praised as “pitbulls”. They are requiring ballots to be counted by hand, also likely delaying the results.
David Becker, who runs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, says he “can’t stress how bad a rule this is” because tired workers will inevitably make mistakes.
In a race expected to come down to tens of thousands of votes, Mr Becker says the result may not be known for days, creating “a vacuum in which disinformation will thrive”.
“We will not know who won the election on election night,” the former Department of Justice voting rights lawyer said. Nevertheless, he believes it is “almost a certainty (Mr Trump) will declare victory sometime on election night”.
“I’ve seen no evidence that former president Trump will do as every single presidential candidate has in American history prior to 2020, and accept the will of the American voters as documented and verified by bipartisan, transparent election officials,” Mr Becker said.
Central to any challenge will be Mr Trump’s claim about illegal immigrants.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson recently called this “a clear and present danger” to the election, as he tried to pass new laws requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, even though it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of Mr Trump’s key backers, regularly claims on his social media platform X that Democrats are “importing voters” into swing states.
“America then becomes a one-party state and democracy is over,” he said.
Public Interest Legal Foundation president J. Christian Adams dismisses this “grand conspiracy”, and although he admits it is “hard to know the scale” of the issue, he warns: “It’s not as if this isn’t happening. The people who say it’s not happening are not credible.”
Like Mr Adams, Hans von Spakovsky – who runs The Heritage Foundation’s election law reform initiative – has long pushed for the states to implement stricter voter registration rules.
“It’s as if they want aliens to be able to register, to be able to vote, and to be able to get away with it,” he said. “Their response to that often is that it’s already illegal, and that’s true. But if something being illegal prevented people from doing it, then our prisons would be empty.”
The Brennan Center for Justice – which calls Mr von Spakovsky “the intellectual godfather of the conservative anti-voting movement” – analysed Mr Trump’s claims of mass non-citizen voting back in 2016. It found 30 suspected incidents out of 23.5 million votes in 12 states.
But the Republican Party is all-in on this strategy. It has replaced its get-out-the-vote effort with a protect-the-vote operation featuring 200,000 poll watchers and hundreds of lawyers, who have already filed over 100 election lawsuits in at least 20 states.
In the key battleground of North Carolina, the party alleged 225,000 people registered to vote without providing proper identification, a claim dismissed by election administrators.
Last month, Mr Musk shared a post about 750,000 voters being removed from the state’s electoral roll to again sound the alarm. But most of those had moved, died or were ineligible because they had not voted for years. Only nine potential non-citizens were uncovered.
In turn, the Democrats have bolstered their legal effort, including with a well-funded political action committee chaired by Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina. He told Politico it was “un-f***ing-believable … that we’re having to relitigate all these things”.
“In 2024, they’re better organised. They have a trial run under their belt. And because of the legal jeopardy Trump is in, they have nothing to lose,” he said.
If Mr Trump legitimately wins, however, Mr von Spakovsky and Ms Wyman think Democrats will challenge the results by claiming voter suppression, also potentially sparking civil unrest.
Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin – who spearheaded the impeachment of Mr Trump over the Capitol riot – has even threatened to use the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding public office to block his return to power.
“It’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified,” he said in February, as he foreshadowed “civil war conditions”.
This time around, the congressional certification of the election will have the nation’s highest level of security. Inside Congress, new rules have set a higher bar for the results to be challenged, and Ms Harris will fulfil the vice president’s traditional role overseeing the proceedings. Mr Becker is “100 per cent confident” the rightful winner will be sworn in.
“What I’m very worried about is the damage that will have been done to our democracy and our society in the meantime,” he said.
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