Attempts by former President Donald Trump and his far right supporters to subvert and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election were ultimately unsuccessful. However, debunked myths about voter fraud and a stolen election are still promoted by Trump to this day, and millions of his supporters believe him.
Now, researchers have identified dozens of “election deniers” in key swing states who are in positions of power and influence ahead of the 2024 elections, suggesting that Trump and the Republican Party are better positioned to act on disinformation and disrupt vote counting this time around.
The Center for Media and Democracy released a report on September 13 identifying 239 Republican election administrators, candidates and party leaders across eight critical swing states who denied the 2020 election results, refused to certify previous elections, or spread misleading claims about widespread voter fraud.
The number of “election deniers” overseeing the 2024 elections is alarming. After scouring social media profiles and public records, researchers identified 102 election administrators at the state and county level who qualify as “election deniers” in eight swing states: Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and New Mexico.
The list also includes 50 Republican congressional candidates and six GOP candidates for statewide executive office, including Kari Lake, a candidate for Senate in Arizona who followed in Trump’s footsteps and spent months unsuccessfully challenging her loss in Arizona’s 2020 gubernatorial race.
To qualify as an “election denier,” the candidate or official must have a record of denying President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump, refusing to certify 2020 results as an election official, expressing support for the Trump campaign’s baseless lawsuits or the “forensic” audits used to challenge the 2020 results, or supporting “Stop the Steal” protests and the deadly January 6 riots inspired by Trumpian conspiracy theories.
“Our democracy’s firewalls held fast in 2020, but election deniers and MAGA extremists have spent the last four years infiltrating election administration and political party positions in order to disrupt and cast doubt on the 2024 election results,” said Arn Pearson, director of the Center for Media and Democracy, in a statement.
Along with state and federal courts, election administrators would likely be the first to consider any calls for audits and challenges to vote counts filed by Republican Party leaders in 2024. At least 81 state and county GOP leaders who denied the 2020 election results are spread out across the eight states, according to the report.
In 2020, Republicans spread racist lies about Black election workers at urban precincts and found multiple avenues to challenge vote tallies in swing states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan, which in some cases successfully delayed the official results and provided time for baseless conspiracy theories to spread online.
The report identifies election boards in 15 counties across seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada and Pennsylvania — as well as the state election board in Georgia, where “election deniers” will hold the voting majority when it comes time to certify the 2024 results.
Most of these election boards operate at the county level, but in Georgia, election-denying Republicans hold a 3-2 majority on the statewide board that decides rule for elections.
The Georgia State Election Board’s pro-Trump majority voted on Friday to require a hand count of every ballot cast in the battleground state, potentially delaying official results of the November elections for weeks or more. Public commenters, including poll workers and supervisors, “begged” the board to reject the measure, and voting rights groups accused Republican board members of intentionally injecting uncertainty and chaos into the election, according to The Washington Post.
Biden’s 2020 narrow victory in Georgia was fueled by turnout among Black voters and enraged Trump, who famously called Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and demanded that he “find” enough votes to change the outcome. Raffensperger refused to go along with Trump’s scheme and won reelection in 2022 despite a primary challenge by a Trump-approved candidate.
Janice Johnston, one the three “election deniers” on the Georgia State Election Board identified in the report, has questioned the 2020 results and voted for a motion in 2023 to investigate Raffensperger over false claims that the election was stolen, a motion that eventually failed. Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, also a Republican, denounced the failed motion in December 2023.
“The election wasn’t stolen and our office is surprised to see particular members of the State Election Board laying the foundation to discredit the next election,” Fuchs said at the time.
In August of this year, Johnston and the other Republicans on the Georgia board approved new rules that empower local election officials to refuse or delay the certification of results as they conduct a vaguely defined “reasonable inquiry” into the vote tally, raising fears of another delayed and contested presidential election in 2024.
In seven of the eight swing states examined by researchers, including Georgia, self-appointed groups of Republicans submitted fake Electoral College votes for Trump in 2020. Prosecutors have pursued fraud charges against some of these fake electors, but the legal cases are unlikely to be resolved before the 2024 vote, according to the report.
The fake elector scheme ultimately failed and resulted in criminal indictments against Trump and his allies in Georgia and at the federal level, but these cases will not be resolved before the 2024 elections and could disintegrate if Trump were to win back the White House.
While watchdogs are less worried about fake electors this time around, Pearson said Republican election administrators, along with candidates and lawmakers, can still work in tandem to spread disinformation and doubt about the 2024 election as administrative reviews and legal challenges delay the officials results. This creates space for conspiracy theorists, pundits and Trump himself to cast doubt on any results they do not like.
“While it is highly unlikely that these officials, along with deniers in Congress, will be able to prevent certification of the 2024 election results, they are in a prime position to force litigation and delay what should be a ministerial task while they and their allies whip up false claims of voter fraud, noncitizen voting, and a stolen election,” Pearson said.
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